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Top Three UMAT Tips

• 1Practice questions. There is a myth out there that preparation will not help for the UMAT. This is simply not true. The most obvious reason to prepare is to get familiar with the format of the exam so that you are better at managing your time and you have some expectation of the exam standard. On top of this, the UMAT questions, especially Sections 1 and 3, have recurring themes and patterns that are very difficult to pick for first-timers. If you have seen them before, you know exactly what to look out for if they come up again, and are instantly pushed ahead of everyone else.
• 2Approach each question as a clean slate. The oldest trick in the book for the UMAT is to design a question relating to something obvious, such as the fact that smoking causes lung cancer. The question stem will then proceed to give you some information about smoking and lung cancer, and then ask you to interpret the information. If the question does not mention the link between them at all, and you pick the option that reads 'Smoking causes lung cancer', you will be marked wrong, even though in the real world, you are correct. This is because in the context of the question, your answer that smoking causes lung cancer is an assumption rather than a deduction. Therefore it is crucial that for every question you throw away all preconceived notions and use only the information given to you.
• 3Learn different strategies for answering questions. Sometimes it is best to look at the question and try and work out the answer, and see if it is one of the options given, such as in pattern-style questions. However, in some questions it is more prudent to simply test each option against the information given in the question, such as in some logical reasoning questions. Knowing when to use what strategy can be crucial in saving time and getting more questions correct.