Why Do So Many Science Students Fail The GAMSAT Science Section?

Hey everybody! I’ve got a question for you. Why do so many Science students mess up or struggle with the GAMSAT Science section? I mean they have Science degrees. They’ve spent three years learning this stuff but then they come to me and they say ‘Dr. Tom, it’s ironic. I’m a Science Student but that was my worst section’.

So, I want to actually talk with you about that because it’s really important for people who are doing the GAMSAT and not just for people who have a Science degree but also those who don’t have a Science degree, because if the Science students are messing it up what about you non-Science students? I want to talk about that today.

So, here’s the situation. To do well at uni, to do well in your Science degree or even in any other degree, the way you do it is you lookup the curriculum, you look at the topics you need to learn and then you go and you learn those topics from the textbooks.

You memorise the stuff from the textbooks, you go to your lectures, you learn your lecture notes and you do some practice questions to see how much you’ve learned and then you go into your uni exam and you show them what you’ve learned and you do well.

That’s the usual formula that you’ve used and many people have used it and it works for uni. But then you go to the GAMSAT and you look at Section 3 and you go ‘Hey! This ia s kind of science. I’ve done this before’ and you look at it and says ‘Physics, Chemistry, Biology’.

You go to the textbooks, you learn those topics, you go to your lecture notes, you learn the lecture notes, you go through some practice questions to see how much you’ve learned and then you get into the GAMSAT and you’re shocked by what you see. The questions are so abstract. They’re so random and unusual.

Half the things you’ve studied aren’t even there and then there’s all these random things you could never have prepared for that are in the GAMSAT.

I was speaking to someone the other day who had questions about dinosaurs and velociraptors in the Science Section, which is an example of the randomness of the things that are in there and there questions are really indirect.

There’s so much information there. It’s nowhere neathe r first-year level and then the science students come to me and they say ‘Dr. Tom, it’s ironic. I’m a science student but that was my worst section’, and this happens because they’re not actually testing you on the science topics.

They’re not testing you on your knowledge of Physics or Chemistry or Biology. They’re not testing you on your knowledge of the content. They’re not even testing applied knowledge. So, then the big question is ‘What are they actually testing you on?’

If you’re reading this and you’re wondering ‘I don’t know what they’re testing me on’, then that’s a bit of a problem because then you don’t know how to actually prepare, what to do, how to do well and what this exam is all about. So, let’s talk about that now because there is a clue in the title of this article as to what they’re actually testing you on.

So, what’s the title of the section? Because it’s not called the Science section and you’re probably wondering what that is too. You’re probably not sure what that is. So, I’ll tell you right now. The title is Reasoning In The Biological and Physical Sciences and there’s your big clue. It’s not your knowledge of or understanding for applied knowledge in, its reasoning in the biological and physical sciences. So, there’s your first big clue.

This is not a test of knowledge or memorising things, it’s a test of reasoning. But, when I say reasoning, it’s not just problem-solving, logical problem-solving or something like that because you can solve problems, you can think logically, you’ve got a degree, you can do that.

Any Science student can do that but many Science students still struggle with the GAMSAT Science section. So it’s not that, there’s more to it. So, reasoning skills. The big question is ‘WHAT IS THAT & HOW YOU DO IT?’.

So, I want to ask you to think to yourself right now, ‘What are GAMSAT reasoning skills and how do you develop them?’. When I ask people this question, they’ll think about it for a second. If you think you know, let me know, because at this point people often go ‘Oh! it’s causing the information to solve to answer the question.

Using the information on the stimulus material to answer the question, that’s reasoning skills. That’s how you answer any exam question. You use the information they give you to answer the question’. That’s not it. There’s more to it than that. Now, that GAMSAT reasoning thing is something that you need to be working on as you prepare the whole time not ‘Oh, I’ll learn some of the topics and then I’ll do reasoning but doing some practice questions’.

That’s not how it works because what happens is you get caught in the rabbit hole of Khan Academy. You jump in and two weeks later you get out of it wondering what day of the week is it and then you run out of time. You don’t do any questions and that doesn’t really help you develop reasoning skills anyway so then you gotta do it in a different way.

Now, I’ve probably left you all puzzling and thinking ‘how do I develop my reasoning skills’?
Not to leave you hanging but if you want to find out more, please get in touch with the team!