It's been a long time since my last post and I feel really bad about it. I had a really good Easter Break and now its back to work for me!
This post will be about the usefulness/effectiveness of interview/ukcat courses.
Personally, I attended 2 UKCAT Courses, one in Singapore and one in the UK.
Were they helpful?
Honestly, to a certain extent, they were kindda helpful. I did the course in Singapore first over Summer during which i got to go through the 600 UKCAT Questions book very thoroughly and through the practice, familiarise myself with the different question types. I then attended a KAPLAN Course which i though was absolutely fantastic. It was a 2 day course and we were even provided with extra tests afterwards. This was honestly very very helpful.
While the first course made me realise the difficulty level of the UKCAT, the KAPLAN course definitely raised my confidence and gave me tips and methods to handle the UKCAT questions.
In addition to these courses, i also signed up for Medify for extra online practice. I only started with medify 2 weeks before my test and I must say, i really regret not using it from the start!
The thing with the UKCAT is that it's an online test. And as with any other test, the best way to practice is under standard conditions. Medify was able to give me this opportunity to try out real questions with a format very similar to the actual UKCAT test .
Now, on to interview courses.
I have not been for any interview courses because i felt that I had invested a lot of my time and money on my UKCAT and I kindda knew that interviews were something that i was quite strong with. I had a senior who went for a course and she passed her notes on to me. From what i saw in the notes. interview courses could either be good or bad.
They could be good because:
They help you gain confidence and give you some practice
You are given some insights as to what to expect
You are given a lot of material to use for your preparation so you will not risk not learning anything important
They could be bad because:
You may come across as being TOO prepared during the actual interview
With the amount of information given , you may be over preparing/ stressing yourself out too much
To me, i think that before you invest your time and money on a course, you should seriously consider if the course will benefit you or not. Consider the following questions first:
Is this aspect of my application my weak point?(do you little confidence in it?)
Will me spending time on this course affect other aspects of my application(A levels)?
Basically, if you think the course is good, go for it, but only if you are sure that you will be able to cope.
