Last minute GAMSAT 1 month study plan day 1-10

Stuck for time? Needing to get some GAMSAT study in stat before the exam looms? Here are 30 days of small actions to help you max out your marks.

Days 1-10
Days 11-20
Days 21-30

• Day 1: Check that you are registered for the GAMSAT. Line up or order any necessary study materials such as textbooks, organic chemistry model kits, practice questions. Check forums for old copies of prep materials for sale, check out your university's second-hand bookshop, look at free online resources. Create a study area and set aside a quiet study time for each day. Print out five copies of your admissions ticket and tuck them into your wallet, handbag and jeans pockets so you will not forget it on the day.
  

• Day 2: Take one of the half-length ACER practice tests. Ensure you take it in a quiet place and to the correct time (don't forget, only give yourself half as long!). Do not use any materials. Get a feel for the length and size of the test, any mental fatigue, how you pace yourself. Take note of which questions you got stuck on the length (still stuck halfway through reading question) and which questions you got stuck on the content (read, but did not understand, and could not work out an answer). The first you'll be improving by using your scanning and speed-reading skills to pull out relevant sections. The second indicate areas you will need to study.
  

• Day 3: Mark your practice test. Panic, and then remember that it's very hard to align raw test scores to final GAMSAT scores after test questions had been removed, scores adjusted and scaled, etc; especially going on only half a test. Sign up to a GAMSAT forum to compare scores with others taking the test. For your essay, request feedback from suitably-qualified friends or colleagues, bribe college teachers for feedback with food, post essays on forums, or pay for an essay marking service.
  

• Day 4: Sign up for a word of the day email. Change daily reading habits to include high-brow newspapers and magazine, especially opinions - check comments section of abc.net.au news and opinions, The Australian. Set up email or RSS feeds to have this material delivered directly to you so you cannot ignore it. Visit your local library to check out books on being a doctor, biological ethics, and literature for Section I practice, or search the Web and Project Gutenberg.
  

• Day 5: Pull out the model kit – or make some playdough and toothpicks – or a whiteboard and marker. It's organic chemistry time! Pick a molecule such as caffeine. Draw it. Create the model. What are it’s functional groups? Does it contain rings, double bonds, triple bonds? Now recreate it backwards, and then in mirror image. Is it chiral? Check your organic chemistry textbook and find a reaction that could occur to your molecule. Look at the sample in your textbook, then at your model. Which carbon chain in your model is R? Which is R’? What happens to the molecule during the reaction? Recreate your model after the reaction. What if R and R’ were connected as a ring? Repeat with different molecules and reactions.

• Day 6: Read up on the essays for Section II. Know about the two essay formats; the argumentative and the reflective. The essay is a lot less easy to define than study of science materials but it's also easier to pick up good marks with some simple changes.
  

• Day 7: Look into speed reading and skimming. Practice on some of your texts for section III. Can you skim a complex text or diagram, and then when checking the question know where to turn back to? This will speed up your answers to questions. Skimming is mostly a matter of slowly building up the spaces between where your eyes rest on the page - creating greater saccades - and letting your peripheral vision pick up the rest.
  

• Day 8: Make up some genetic traits like left- or right-eyed flounder fish or green- or purple-eyed aliens. Which one is recessive? Which is dominant? Make up a Punnett square to show what happens if two creatures with different genotypes breed. What's the probability you'll get a green-eyed alien? What's the possibility, if it bred with itself, that it's offspring would also be green-eyed? Would it be pure-bred (also known as homozygous, ie you'd never get purple-eyed offspring)? What if your alien did not have only two of every gene, but three? What would the offspring ratios look like then? Mendel's original experiments on peas are interesting and great simple examples - although modern statistics say he might have fudged his numbers! Finally, can you work out the percentages for each offspring type in an overall population using only the allele percentages? (Hint: Hardy-Weinberg)
  

• Day 9: Read a book on philosophy, logic, or science ethics. What makes a strong argument? Think back on some points argued in the book that you read. Were these strong arguments? Look into a list of logical fallacies. Have you used some of these in your arguments?
  

• Day 10: Look at the comments on a news website on a recent, controversial issue - perhaps something medically related such as euthanasia or abortion. Can you spot the logical fallacies in their arguments? How does the quality of arguments vary between 'tabloid' websites such as news.com.au and other websites such as abc.net.au? Write a short practice argumentative essay on the topic, checking your logic and your facts.