Why Is My UCAT Score Not Improving? 3 Reasons and Solutions

Has your UCAT performance come to a standstill? 

UCAT prep score plateaus are frustrating, confusing, and even a little defeating. With exam day looming closer, it’s easy to worry that you might not have what it takes.

But luckily, with a few proven strategies, you can identify the cause of your problems, fix them, and get back on track on the path towards medical school.

The Three Main Causes of UCAT Plateaus

Fundamentally, there are three causes of UCAT plateaus: you’re not working on the right things, you’re not working enough, and/or you’re not working efficiently enough. Often, multiple of these are at play, but here’s how to identify each on their own:

• Not working on the right things - In UCAT prep, returns diminish over time. If you’ve been focusing on applying the same strategies to the same subtests for a while, you might’ve exhausted most of the improvement at your disposal.

• Not working enough - University is busy. It’s easy to let things fall by the wayside while juggling schoolwork, UCAT prep, and everything in between. But unfortunately, if you’re struggling to devote consistent effort to the UCAT, you’re unlikely to see the improvements you’re looking for.

• Not working efficiently enough - You can think of efficiency as improvement per unit of time. If you’re seeing consistent (but very slow) improvements across the board, it could be a matter of learning how to get more from what you’re already doing.

How to Break Through Your Plateau

These might sound hard to overcome, but if we break them down, it’s a lot simpler than it seems. Here’s what you need to know:

If you’re not working on the right things

The bottleneck here is figuring out where your weakest areas are, then finding (and learning) new, more efficient ways of tackling them. This could involve:

• Referring to the Learn Curriculum modules for specific subtests
• Looking for patterns in your past errors, and reflecting on how to circumvent them
• Using the Skill Trainers (in moderation) to sharpen your weakest skills

If you’re doing it right, this will feel very uncomfortable — after all, you’re applying unfamiliar strategies to difficult question types. But because it’s uncomfortable, very few people will be willing to do the same, and therein lies your advantage.

If you’re not working enough

What would the world’s most productive person look like? They’d choose to work exclusively on the most important task, and then, once they’d found such a task,  they wouldn’t do anything except that. Of course, you and I need to eat and sleep, but we can use this extreme example to outline some principles:

• Make it easy to do the right stuff - bookmark MedEntry in your browser, download the MedEntry App, and schedule consistent time for UCAT prep.
• Make it hard to do the wrong stuff - block social media sites with browser extensions, keep your phone away while studying, and don’t overcommit to extracurriculars, work obligations, or one-off events.
• Look after yourself in the process - get plenty of sleep, make regular contact with friends and family, and take a break every once in a while.

There are plenty of other ways to achieve this effect, but the suggestions above are a good starting point. And once you’ve applied them, there’s only one potential issue left:

If you’re not working efficiently enough

This is the most amorphous one. If you’re not careful, “becoming more efficient” can easily turn into wasting hours on pointless research. So let’s save you the time and get more specific.

As a general rule: efficient UCAT prep requires you to confront your weaknesses as often as possible, with as few distractions as possible, and with the highest possible chance of success.

This principle can be applied to make any kind of practice more efficient, but to save you the effort, let’s outline the time-tested strategies used by previous top-performing candidates:

• Replicate test conditions - (no distractions, time pressure, sit longer mocks as often as possible). This is a forcing function for your timing skills, and prevents you from falling into the trap of practicing while half-focused (also known as “wasting time”).
• Review your practice questions regularly - The more often you’re looking back through your mistakes, the shorter the feedback loop of improvement. This is the dull, yet necessary work that separates successful candidates from the rest.
• Retry incorrect questions after each mock exam/subtest - This serves to consolidate your improvements after reviewing, and thankfully, MedEntry has a custom-built feature for exactly this purpose.

The Bottom Line

There are many things that could be causing a plateau in your UCAT prep, and every student’s situation is unique. Rather than looking for one-size-fits-all solutions, the key is understanding which specific factors are holding you back. But by applying the principles above to your circumstances, you can figure out where to focus on, allocate your attention accordingly, and reap the rewards.

Trust the process. Stay consistent. It might turn out better than you think.

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