It’s both! We believe that combining face-to-face teaching and online practice brings out the best in students. Our UCAT Pro Course for 2022 candidates includes a total of 77.5 hours of face-to-face* teaching (22 hours in person during Masterclass 1 and 2 and 55.5 hours via webinar during the regular UCAT progress classes). Since the UCAT is a computerised test, our online course is hosted on a custom-built learning management system that provides the same test-taking experience as the official UCAT. Furthermore, the online course’s curriculum-based approach means that you are always taught how to solve questions before you actually attempt them; this helps to maximise students’ mindfulness. Learning in this way allows students to identify and fix their personal weaknesses faster, leading to more natural and more efficient preparation. (*NB: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, masterclasses may be held online in compliance with government requirements.) For more information, check out our Courses page.

We hold the UCAT Pro Course (specifically the masterclasses) in all major cities across Australia and New Zealand: Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Auckland.

(*NB: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, masterclasses may be held online in compliance with government requirements.)

UCAT Masterclass 1 is first held in early December (may be subject to change due to COVID-19), with repeat streams held between January and May. This masterclass is an intensive two-day workshop that teaches the techniques for every question type found in the most recent UCAT exam. Students also put their learning to the test by immediately solving 70 questions to boost familiarity and speed.

UCAT Masterclass 2 is held in late June/early July, by which time students must have mastered the question-solving techniques and should be ready to learn advanced test-taking strategies that will help them to make the most of their time on the big day.

UCAT progress classes commence in August 2021 and are hosted on our state-of-the-art webinar platform. They start at 7pm AEST and are held once a fortnight during school terms and once a week during school breaks. If you miss some of the progress classes, don’t worry—we record all of the lessons so that students can review them later. For more dates, check out our Courses page.

In 2019, almost 400 iCanMed students scored 3000 or more (i.e. 96th percentile or higher) on the UCAT. When we interviewed these students, most of them revealed that they spent around 250–300 hours preparing for the test. This may sound like a lot, until you realise that most medical or dental schools weight the UCAT as heavily as your ATAR. This means that the 2-hour UCAT exam is worth the same amount as all of your assessments, assignments, and hours spent studying for high-school or university subjects combined!

However, for students whose preparation only consists of doing mock exams and question banks without first learning the right techniques, it is very common to spend more than 500 hours preparing for the UCAT. Talk about inefficient prep! For more advice about how to prepare for the UCAT, check out our Resources page.

Absolutely! Progress tracking is essential for any student to make sure they are preparing the right way. The UCAT Pro Course helps students with this in a variety of ways. Firstly, a progress bar has been incorporated into each of the major modules of the online learning management system to show how many lessons you’ve completed and how many you have yet to complete. Secondly, to help you check if you’re improving and to manage your speed and accuracy issues, the course includes a large collection of tools, worksheets and activities to be used alongside the teaching videos and practice questions. Lastly, you can review your performance for every quiz and test in our course (there are a lot of them!) to see how much time you spend on each question (for timed tests) and which questions still require more work.

An extremely important feature of the UCAT Pro Course is unlimited opportunities to contact our UCAT coaches and receive direct, personalised feedback. All questions are answered within 24 hours, every day of the year. Students can do this a few ways: they can leave their question in the comments section of an online lesson; they can Discord message, email, SMS or call our coaches; and they can add our coaches on Facebook. Communication via Discord allows for live conversation and is preferred by the majority of students. You can contact us using the method that best suits you!

The best time to finish most of your UCAT prep is the end of January (for high school students) or the end of February (for university students) in the year you will be applying for medicine. Once Semester 1 starts, you will not have enough time to prepare for the UCAT alongside your school subjects, extra-curricular activities, interview preparation, leadership roles, voluntary work and/or paid work. Therefore, if you are sitting the UCAT in 2022, start preparation NOW so that you will be set to finish your UCAT prep by the end of the summer break. (If you are sitting the UCAT in 2023, you have two summer holidays to comfortably learn and master all of the UCAT question types before Year 12 begins.) Due to the importance of your ATAR, more and more students are opting to begin their preparation in Year 10 to avoid leaving it to the last minute and self-sabotaging their ATAR or UCAT result.

The course includes 2,500 UCAT questions (including five fully-timed mock exams) covering all 14 of the question types found in Section 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the 2021 UCAT exam. (After the 2022 UCAT testing period is over, these questions will be updated to reflect those in the 2022 exam). The questions are professionally written and reviewed by qualified assessment writers to represent the real exam in every way; their length, styles, nuances, variations, challenges and ways of being solved are all the same. For every question, there is also a full step-by-step video solution around 5 to 15 minutes long that demonstrates how to solve each question using accurate, transferrable and agile techniques. Imagine having 2,500 videos (with a total length of at least 12,500 minutes) of your math teacher solving every question in front of you!