Reddit reviews Get into Medical School : 600 UKCAT Practice Questions: Includes Full Mock Exam, Comprehensive Tips, Techniques and Explanations

Is the 600 questions book you've got this one? If so, brilliant, the questions in there are harder than the actual questions you'll get, so it's perfect to practice with, but don't get discouraged by it. I got that book and was horrified at how difficult some of the questions were.

With the resit stuff, honestly it's more the marks that matter and their contribution to next year than the actual grades you got, so a remark to push a subject to an A isn't necessarily all that worth it. Some of the other medics I knew who got low A's in biol and chem decided to retake anyway just to push up their chances of an A overall for the A level. I can't talk for other subjects, but with chemistry the retake didn't actually take much extra effort, since a lot of the second year stuff (we were doing OCR salters chemistry) built off the first year stuff, so by the time I did the retake I could have got the marks I needed on it in my sleep. I imagine it's probably the same for most subjects.

How much guidance are your college giving you with the personal statement? I found what they wanted and what I'd initially thought I'd do were completely different. At first I'd thought I should avoid going down the whole generic "I want to help people" route, since it's basically a given, and I thought it'd just be dull, but apparently that's totally wrong - the more generic it seems, the better (I actually ended up using a thesaurus to find more ways of saying "help"). The way we were advised to stand out is how we talked about our work experience and volunteering. If you can sound like you really understand what being a doctor is like by reference to what you've actually seen then they really love it. If you'd like (and promise not to copy, of course) I can show you my one as an example - it got me four interviews, so I must've done something right (can't help a little boast, I was so pleased with myself over that :D)

The actual workload doesn't get much worse, except for some of the coursework is a bit of a pain, it's that what you learn becomes harder to understand right off the bat. That said, it does depend on what subjects you've got - my view of things is pretty heavily skewed by further maths, which just got crazy hard in the second year. The actual biol and chem don't get that much worse (chem a little worse than biol though, at least for me), it's more memory with those two.

And don't worry about it, I'm really happy to help.

I studied using this book. I spent approximately 1 month just practicing the questions and trying to understand their reasoning for the answers. Did well enough to apply anywhere.

Hope this helps.