Speaker 1: Alright, so the UCAT decision-making subtest seems like one that's designed to trick you. There's so many question types, so many little rules you have to follow, and so many questions that are vague or just downright confusing. I was originally getting scores of around 500 on the decision-making subtest, but then I changed my mindset and my strategy and on the actual UCAT, I ended up getting a perfect score. How? That's what I'll be sharing with you in this video. My name's Emil, and I scored in the 99th percentile on the UCAT in 2020, and this video is the second video of my UCAT crash course sponsored by MedEntry. In this video, I'll give a quick overview of the decision-making subtest, share my general mindset and strategy, some tips and tricks, and go through some questions myself live on camera. In the decision-making subtest, you're expected to answer 29 questions in 31 minutes. This subtest has the largest variety of question types, and some of the questions are worth two marks and can have these drag and drop answer options, and other questions can just be multiple choice and worth one mark. The whole subtest is worth 36 marks, and you have a little bit over 60 seconds to answer each question. This section of the UCAT is designed to test your ability to think critically, understand information, and finally solve problems. The first part of my general strategy for the decision-making subtest was a mindset shift, which is that not all of the questions in the decision-making subtest are made equal. Some of the decision-making questions, such as the drag and drop yes or no answer questions, can take a really long amount of time, and can require a lot of mental effort on your part to get 100% correct. On the other hand, some of the multiple choice questions in the subtest can be relatively easy, and you can finish them in anywhere between 20 to 30 seconds. Because of that, try to develop the mindset of not completing this subtest in order, and being really willing to skip questions that might seem really difficult. When I'm answering decision-making questions themselves, the first thing that I do is I start by reading the stimulus very carefully. I try to understand the information really well, focusing on how things relate to each other within the passage or within the stimulus, so that when I look at the questions, I know where to look for certain bits of information. This is a lot like verbal reasoning, where you don't need to memorize the passage, but when you look at the answer options or the questions that you're asked, you should know exactly where to look and what steps you need to take to solve the question. Once I read through the passage, the next step I take is to read through the answer options. The reason I do this is sometimes decision-making questions can be really tricky and will have answers that are obviously the right answer that you could tell from the get-go. They can trick you to do unnecessary working out and waste time when you probably could have looked at the answer options, known that it was the right answer straight away, picked it and moved on from the question in less than 20 seconds. Once you've read through the answer options, return back to the stimulus and the passage and then start to do some working out either using your noteboard or in your head to try and work out the correct answer out of your choices. The final step is just to pick your right answer and then move on as quickly as possible. Don't ruminate on the questions and don't keep looking at it and trying to do your working out again. Moving on to my tips and tricks for this subtest, the first tip I have is to get familiar with all of the question types. The decision-making subtest has about six or seven question types and as a result, it's important to know the general strategy required for each of these different question types because they tend to be unique and have different ways of getting to the answer. When you're practicing and trying to get better as well, make sure you try and figure out which question types you tend to struggle with as a whole rather than just thinking, okay, I'm bad at the decision-making subtest. Once you identify the specific questions that you tend to get wrong in the decision-making subtest, then spend some time looking on how you can fix the errors that you're making in that specific question type. My second tip is that when you get an answer, never second-guess yourself in the decision-making subtest. I know personally of many times where I've selected the right answer and then I doubted myself and I ended up doing the working all over again just to get the same answer and for me to waste around 30 to 40 seconds when I could have just selected the answer and moved on. Make sure you avoid this because time is of the essence in the subtest and even if you were to catch a mistake, you could probably have earned that mark back by just doing a different question in 30 to 40 seconds instead. Within this, also make sure that you don't get stuck and spend huge amounts of time on questions that are really difficult. If, for example, you ended up spending two to three minutes on a drag-and-drop yes-no question and you got it right, then you'll get two marks. But in that time, you might have been able to do another six multiple-choice questions and gotten six marks instead. My third tip is to make sure you use the noteboard. For a lot of question types in decision-making, using the noteboard can be really helpful to draw out tables, diagrams, or orders to actually understand the questions and figure out the answer very quickly. Trying to keep everything in your head can end up making you very tired very quickly and can also mean that you make mistakes or forget what you thought previously. With all of these tips, the general idea is that you need to save time and do the questions that are easier first rather than the ones that are hard. When you're using the noteboard, try and get used to the general way that you'll have to use the noteboard for certain types of questions and get used to how you like to interpret information and how you best come to the answer. With all of these tips and tricks, the main idea is that you need to save time and make sure you spend your time on the questions that are easy rather than the ones that are difficult. Before I move on to doing some questions on camera, I'd like to thank MedEntry for sponsoring this series. MedEntry is the UCAT preparation platform that I used when I was preparing for the UCAT and I find that they have the questions that are most similar to the actual test. They have skills trainers, a written guide and an extensive question bank with thousands of questions for you to use to practice and over 20 mock exams, so sign up using the link in the description box down below to get 15% off their platinum or online subscriptions. So I've got the MedEntry decision-making question bank up on the screen and the first question type that I'll go through in this subtest are the syllogisms. The first thing that I do with syllogism questions is I read through the passage or the stimulus very, very carefully and try to get as good of an understanding of it as possible. So once I've read through the stimulus, which I have done now, then I'll start to go through the questions and what I'll do is I'll go from the question and I'll go in between the question and the stimulus to try and verify whether this thing is true, yes or no. So with this first one, this vegetable is green. They tell you that this vegetable is either a lettuce or a pumpkin, tell you that all lettuces are green, but they don't tell you anything about whether pumpkins are green. So this is going to be no. Some pumpkins are green. There's nothing about the colour of pumpkins in the stimulus. This is going to be no. This vegetable is either big or green. So it tells you it's either big or it's green. So if it's a lettuce, it's going to be green. So yes. If it's a pumpkin, it's going to be big. So this is going to be yes. All lettuces are big. Nothing about lettuce size in this passage. So this one's going to be no. Some lettuces are purple. Nothing about... So they just tell you all lettuces are green. So some lettuces cannot be purple. So this is going to be no. So this one is a fairly easy syllogism question. But you can see that it's important to go in between the question and the stimulus to make sure that you're getting these things right and that you're confirming whether a certain question is correct or not. It's important to know with these syllogism questions that these are worth two marks. And if you get all five of these answer options correct, then you'll get all two marks. If you get one of these wrong, then you only get one mark. If you get two or more of them wrong, you'll get zero marks for the entire question. And because of that, it's really important that if you're dedicating the time to these questions, you want to get the full two marks for a question. Because if you spend a huge amount of time and you get one of them wrong, you lose 50% of the marks for this question. So as you can see, we got that syllogism question right. And we'll move on to the next question type, which will be logic puzzles. So here you can see a very classic logic puzzle question where they give you a bunch of information and then you have to decide whether who's coming first in the line or what the order of the line is. The first thing that I'll do with these questions is just have a read of the stimulus very carefully. This is a recurring theme in the decision-making subtest. So I've read the stimulus and I've read the question, which is Justin fakes his height and goes one position forward in the line than he is supposed to. Who are the second and third members in the line respectively? The first thing that I'll do now is just write in my noteboard because I want to get this information out of my head and onto paper so that I don't get too confused with the information that's given to me. So what I'll write on my noteboard here is I'll have tallest and then I'll have shortest at one end. And this is the front of the line and the back of the line. And then I'll just use letters to denote the people's names. So I've got Jay, he's three centimetres taller than Pragandesh. So that's P. Lance is seven centimetres shorter than Evan. And Pragandesh is one centimetre shorter than Evan. So here I'll probably have to do Evan here. And then you've got Evan, this is going to be one centimetre difference here. Then you have Justin is three centimetres shorter than Pragandesh. So this is three. And then you know that Lance is seven centimetres shorter than Evan. So he has to be here in the line in total. Then we've got told that if Justin fakes his height and goes one position forward, who are the second and third members in the line respectively? This is just him going one bit forward. Then it's going to be Justin and Pragandesh. And that's the answer to the question. So you can see that we got that question right. And you can see that by writing things down on your noteboard, it makes the whole question so much easier to do and easier to understand. So the next question type you see here are these interpreting data questions. These ones are slightly different from the syllogisms because they can have data like graphs or tables. And they also tend to have more statistics or things like that, that you need to confirm with the stimulus. Here, the strategy that I use is very similar to the syllogisms. I read the stimulus and then I try to get my answers to each of these questions by looking between the question and the stimulus. So here now I've read the stimulus and I see the first question. According to the survey, more than 50% of the people who do desk balance jobs suffer from heart ailments. They tell you that most people who do desk balance jobs suffer from heart ailments. You do know that most means more than 50%, so this is going to be yes. Then you see most people who do desk balance jobs lack proper exercise. Here, you don't necessarily know anything about whether people who do these jobs actually don't get exercise. You only get told that people suggest doing exercise to reduce the chance of heart-related diseases. This is going to be no. Heart diseases are caused due to lack of exercise. Again, you don't necessarily know that. You only know that experts suggest that physical exercise can reduce the risk of or the chance of heart-related diseases. Physical exercise for half an hour every day is a healthy habit for people who lack activity in their day-to-day work. This, you could say yes because it reduces the chance of heart-related diseases. So that would probably be yes. People having proper physical activities will not have heart ailments. This is no because it only reduces the chance. It doesn't reduce it to zero, so this would be no. Here, you can say it's pretty easy to just go quickly between the question and the stimulus. Once you understand it, it's often really, really easy to get the correct answer to these questions. As you can see, we got all of those questions right. We'll move on to the next question type, which will be the strongest argument. The strongest argument question type is quite tricky because it's a lot different to the normal question types you get in decision-making, but they're also quite good because they take a very little amount of time to complete. The first thing that I do with these strongest argument question types is I just read the answer, the stimulus, really carefully and I try to identify what issues are present in the stimulus. Here, they say, should social media apps be allowed to receive your personal information for the benefit of social media companies? So here, the big key issues are social media apps, personal information, and social media companies. Now, I know that a strongest argument has to relate to all three of these elements or at least mention them and be somewhat relevant to these issues in the scenario. So we'll look at answer option A. Yes, advertisement companies will be more likely to pay to place their advertisement on social media. They know they can target special interest groups, increasing to increase revenue for social media companies. So since this is about the benefit of social media companies, this means that A does actually respond to all of these aspects of the question. So I am agreeing with A at the moment. B, yes, private investigators may then be able to identify individuals. This has nothing to do with social media companies, so it's not going to be B. C, no social media companies prefer to respect the privacy of their users. This doesn't have anything to do with the benefit of social media companies again, so it's not going to be C. D, making personal information is dangerous for social media users. Again, you have to remember it's about the benefit of social media companies, which is why the answer is going to be A. As you can see, we got that question right, which is really good. Now we'll move on to the next question type, which is Venn diagrams. So the Venn diagram questions can be quite overwhelming because there's often a lot of numbers on the page and a lot of these odd squares and intersections between the Venn diagrams. The thing that I recommend here is to just go for the questions and try to eliminate answers or confirm them. So what I do here is I don't actually look at the Venn diagram and try and understand it. The first thing I do is I look at the answer options and I try to confirm whether these things are true. So here I see A, there are more students using Bebo than there are students using MySpace. So here I want to look at, okay, what is Bebo on the legend? It's the cross. And what is MySpace on the legend? It's the triangle. So then I know that I need to add up all of these numbers to figure out which one has a greater amount of people in it. Here, a little trick that I can use is since I know that these two spaces interact, so Bebo and MySpace, I can actually just count the things that are outside of the intersection to decide which one has more people using it. So I know with MySpace, it's going to be 1 plus 42 plus 13. So that's going to be around 56. With Bebo, I know it's going to be 19 plus 11 plus 5, which is going to be less. So A is not true. B, there are more students using only Friend Store than the total number of students using only one of any other social media. This one, I might think to myself, okay, this seems like something that's hard to figure out. So I might actually skip over this question and look at C instead. C, there are fewer students using both WeChat and Bebo than there are students that uses MySpace. So here I'll see both WeChat and Bebo. So we've got Bebo is the cross and WeChat is the square. And we see that this is going to be 27 plus 3 plus 4, which is going to be 34. So here you can see that skipping B was actually really good because I saved a lot of time from doing this and I got to C, which was much easier to work out, and C was the correct answer. Also, just quickly, remember that you don't have to do this maths all in your head. You can press Alt plus C to bring up the on-screen calculator and you can just like type in these numbers onto the calculator in itself. You don't have to do that maths in your head. We got that question correct, which is great. So now we'll move on to the last question type in this subtest, which are the maths and probability questions. So what you see on screen here are the classic probability type questions that you get in decision making. What you see here is that there are these four statements and each of them have like this probability of someone getting a better deal in this chess game. So you have Mikhail is a chess player deciding on which strategy you use. Queen's Gambit or Ruy Lopez. You see, if he uses Queen's Gambit, there's a 35% chance it'll play too defensively. If he uses the Ruy Lopez, there's a 6 in 20 chance it'll play too defensively. And then he has a 30% chance of not gaining a stable position if he uses the Ruy Lopez. And he has a 70% chance of gaining a stable position if he uses the Queen's Gambit. So with these, what you need to realise is that the majority of these questions will have two probabilities that are exactly the same. So in this question, what you see is that if he uses the Queen's Gambit, the stable position probability is the same. So he has the same chance of gaining a stable position if he uses the Queen Gambit and if he uses Ruy Lopez. So now you have a look at the answer options and you see what is the question actually asking you. See, considering only the chance that Mikhail does not play too defensively and that the chance that he will gain a stable position, is Queen's Gambit the better strategy? So now you know that with the Queen's Gambit, the chance of gaining a stable position is the same regardless of which strategy he uses. So the only thing that matters is if he plays too defensive or not, which is a bad thing. So here what you need to do is now you need to convert the Ruy Lopez into a percentage. And 6 in 20, I know it's going to be 3 in 10, which is 30%. So if he uses the Ruy Lopez, there's a lower chance that he will play too defensively, which means that the Queen's Gambit is not the better strategy. So he has a reduced likelihood of playing too defensively with the Ruy Lopez and that's how you do these probability questions. Note that the trick is just understanding that two of these probabilities are probably going to be the same and the only other skill you need really is to convert one of these probabilities into the same thing so that you can actually compare them really easily. There you go, you can see that we got all of those question types correct and I hope now that you have a good understanding of just the differences in strategy that you take for each of the question types in the decision-making subtest. If you found this video helpful, please do hit that like button and remember to subscribe to get notified for all of the upcoming videos I have in this UCAT series and make sure to check out my verbal reasoning guide here and the playlist with all of the videos here.