The case against practice questions in the science section

Some believe that doing endless practice questions is some sort of secret elixir to getting a high score.

“Just do lots of practice questions and you’ll be ok.”

No one knows how and why they should do this. It’s just that someone said it in the depths for a GAMSAT group somewhere and it kinda sounds like a good idea.

And look, doing some practice questions and exams is important. It’s part of an effective approach.

But let’s crack this thing open and have a deeper look, shall we…

Because truth is, doing practice questions is absolutely useless if you don’t have the skills to perform well on them.

(That’s why you’re not improving in your practice questions)

And… here’s the kicker…

Doing more questions doesn’t develop the skills required to do well on them. It’s tests them.

And GAMSAT is a test of skills.

Practice questions are tests – to assess your level of ability and skill. And if you don’t have that skill and knowledge then no amount of repeats tests is going to change that.

It’s like doing your final uni exams over and over again without any study in between and hoping that you’ll somehow get a better result next time.

It’s crazy. 

It doesn’t work.

And it’s the same with the GAMSAT.

The sad part is that this ‘Just do lots of questions’ approach has caused countless hard working, well meaning, big hearted GAMSAT candidates to fail year after year.

And it will do so again this year…

People buy into this approach of doing lots of questions and then wonder why it “didn’t work.”

Or worse…

They start to think that maybe there’s something wrong with them. So many others have used this approach and got results, why can’t I? What’s wrong with me?

So they take it as a sign that maybe they should give up. Maybe they’re not smart enough. 

And I’m here to tell you that’s all BS.

Nothing is wrong with you. You are not the problem. The problem is the approach.

And at the risk of being repetitive and redundant (as one of my favourite trolls once said), you can’t do well on the questions until you develop the skills to do well on them. And the questions don’t develop those skills. The questions are there to test them.

So then how do you develop those skills?

This is a huge topic which I can’t explain in an email, which is why I’m running this.

But what I can tell you is that you don’t do it by any of the following:

* Studying more science content (even if you’re new to science, or have a science degree but haven’t covered the topics since first year)
* Making your usual summary notes on more topics
* Memorising Khan academy, lecture notes, textbooks or flashcards.
* Doing more practice questions (#RepetitiveToMakeAPoint)

When people get this right, most of them see an upward trend in their question results, The speed of their progress increases significantly, almost all of a sudden this exam becomes very doable and they don’t get flustered by unfamiliar questions.

If you want to know more about how to do that then check this out.

Cheers,

Dr “Develop the skills before you test them” Tom