The 4 Common Problems You’ll Face in Section 1…and Solutions

Let’s talk about Section One.

A LOT of people struggle with this particular section in the GAMSAT and we’ve talked to a lot of candidates on the phone and it often comes up about some of the problems that they’re having and the main kind of areas within section one that they are struggling with.This article is going to talk about that now and how to start addressing it now.

The first major problem: TIMING. Firstly, reading the passages and trying to figure out the answer.

They going back and forth trying to get it right and end up running out of time, so they just have to pick an answer and move on. It feels like everything takes so long and they end up having to answer a whole bunch of questions at the end without having the time to read the stimulus because they run out of time.

So, timing in section one comes down to two things: The first thing is how quickly you can read in general. Are you a slow reader or a first reader? How do you determine if you are either a slow or faster ready? Circumstances around how fast you can read, depends on the type of pressure it is, for example in an exam.

You don’t necessarily have the time to read at your own pace, like you do when you’re reading a leisurely book whilst on holidays. Other factors may include, if English isn’t your first language and you’re trying to interpret 18th century poetry.

The second thing is: how quickly can you understand what you’ve just read and for most people this is where the pressure is put on them because if you don’t get it, you have to go back and reread the section of different parts. You then go back to the question to try and figure out what’s going on and you still don’t understand. So you going back and forth and to understand it, and if that you, then we get it.
What they’re really struggling with is that actually understanding the passages and trying to interpret what they’re talking about, and trying to figure out which part of the text are they referring to and on top on that , trying to do it quickly and effectively.

That’s their biggest problem. You narrow it down to two options, and you’re sitting there going ‘oh my gosh, which would could it possibly be. You end up picking the wrong one because timing got the best of you.
So to summarise, the 2 problems is timing and being able to interpret the stimulus material.

The third problem is often that people don’t even know how to prepare for this section. It it just seems like a black box of mystery, about what to actually do to prepare.

A lot of people say, read widely. It’s one of my pet peeves as it’s a waste of time.
Reading widely doesn’t work. If you’re doing it, stop. Anyone who tells you to do it, doesn’t know what they’re talking about and don’t listen to them because essentially, what they’re saying is, ‘I don’t know what works, just read widely and hopefully, one of the things you’ll read is going to be helpful, which is a waste of time.

As you could spend months, weeks, so much time, reading all sorts of different things, watching ted talks reading newspapers, reading different plays and books and things and who knows if it’s actually going to be useful or helpful on the day of the exam!

Chances are that whatever you’re reading, probably won’t come up on the GAMSAT, so what’s the point?
The key lesson here is HOW you study for this section. It has to be very specific, targeted and systematic so that you’re being effective with what you’re doing. What you’re doing is actually learning skills that are going to be in place and available on the day of the exam. So that you know when you sit down to do it on the day you look at the stimulus material, you develop the skills and the process and the strategies to pull that text apart and understand what they’re talking about quickly and effectively so that you don’t have to go back and forth back and forth trying to figure it out.

Lastly, the fourth common problem that people have with section one is vocabulary. I hear this a lot and the challenge that you’re gonna face is that there are that thousands of words in the English language, tens of thousands and say if you’re going to create a massive massive vocabulary list and try to learn all those words, chances are, that they probably won’t even come up in the exam.
Instead, I’m going to have this long list of 400 words that you never looked over or maybe you did, once or twice and so you’ve wasted any time that you actually could have prepared for the exam.

The way to overcome that?

Become good at interpreting words from the phrases around them from within the passage within the text to be able to eliminate some of the different meanings or the possibilities and be able to interpret from the passage.
So the more that you can get better at that, you’ll get better at applying the skills.
I hope that this article has been helpful, and if you want to know more, then come along to my live webinar next Thursday 18th Oct where I’ll go into detail about how to do all of that and apply it to your own study.
Register here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_q1oKYOIQQUK4DC90OltJzA