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Although it isn’t the longest section of the GAMSAT ® exam, preparing for GAMSAT ® Section 1 can be challenging for many students, most ostensibly due to the fact that, unlike Section 3, there isn’t really a clear list of things you need to know. Furthermore, it’s not uncommon for science-background students to struggle with Section 1 (and Section 2 for that matter) due to a lack of wider reading. This guide aims to provide you with an overview of how to prepare for and approach Section 1 of the GAMSAT ® exam
Feeling overwhelmed with all the information available and not sure how to start preparing for GAMSAT ® Section 1? Our expert tutors, Nick and Felicity, have summarised the contents of this page in this GAMSAT ® Section 1: How to Prepare video guide.
Section 1 of the GAMSAT ® exam is also known as “Reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences”. ACER uses this multi-choice section to assess your interpretation of qualitative information as well as your reading comprehension. As a result, it could be considered the foil to Section 2, which is an assessment of your language production. For Section 1 of the GAMSAT ® exam you will be asked questions on a wide array of different media forms, which may include the following (note that this list is not exhaustive):
| Description | Breakdown | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Section 1: Reasoning in Humanities | Tests critical reasoning skills as well as the ability to draw conclusions based on evidence with stimuli derived from a variety of non-scientific texts, from fiction and poetry to cartoons | Reading Time 62 MCQs | 8 Minutes 92 Minutes |
As in all the sections of the GAMSAT ® exam, exam, the questions in Section 1 will range in difficulty, and so it’s important to be able to answer the ‘easy’ questions quickly, and ‘bank’ some time for yourself. This will come in handy when you have to spend time on the more difficult questions- Due to the nature of the GAMSAT ® exam, it will be these questions that differentiate you from the crowd.
Having a rough estimate of the allotted time per MCQ will also help you keep track of your progress to ensure that you are making adequate progress on the day, and let you know if you need to redouble your efforts to finish in time. It's important to keep in mind that you can obviously only get marks for questions you answer, so make sure that you make it to the end.
For general tips and strategies on how you can prepare for the GAMSAT ® exam, visit our Guide to GAMSAT ® Preparation.
The purpose of the GAMSAT ® Section 1 is to challenge your reasoning and comprehension skills relating to the humanities and social sciences. The skills tested here are more important than you might think in the life of a medical student and medical professional.
One of the first and most important jobs in the life of a medical professional is to collect information on patient history and their current health status. When interacting with patients in a hospital or clinical setting, it is essential that medical professionals are able to understand both the literal facts in a patient’s story, as well as the subtext of what they might be saying.
For example, if a person is unable to walk due to an injury in their ankle, medical professionals must do more than simply assess and provide care for the physical pain. Healthcare is about understanding the broader context of a person’s illness or disease and providing long-term, culturally appropriate and effective solutions. This may mean that you need to know whether the patient lives alone, whether they will need railings in their home to assist them in their recovery, or if they have any ongoing fears relating to their injury.
These are all parts of a patient’s story which you may need to identify from a single interaction. More to the point - you may have to sift through a large amount of unnecessary information to identify the key points. It is these skills that are tested in the GAMSAT® Section 1.
On a surface level, this section will involve reading a text and responding to questions related to that text. There can be as many 15+ texts to read throughout the section. Nothing too difficult, right?
Students often neglect Section 1 while studying for the GAMSAT ® under the false assumption that it is the easiest part of the exam. However, the combination of time pressure and the complexity of the worded questions can often make this section one of the most challenging for students.
In this section you can expect to be pushed to your limits in terms of time-management skills, and you can expect to analyse and synthesise a large quantity of information. Most importantly, you will be expected to make difficult decisions on often ambiguous aspects of tone, imagery, language and ideas. Read our blog article on How to Improve GAMSAT ® Section 1 for some useful tips.
As they are dependent on the passage, the types of questions you can receive in GAMSAT ® Section 1 can vary widely. Nonetheless, there are a number of common categories that questions may fall under. These include:
In addition to these four major categories, examiners may add complexity to the questions by using modifiers such as ‘except’, ‘least’ or ‘not’ to make sure that students are reading the questions carefully. This section is also notorious for use of Roman Numeral style questions, where you may have to choose from multi-component answers using a Roman Numeral system - For example:
Homecoming
By Bruce Dawe
All day, day after day, they’re bringing them home,
they’re picking them up, those they can find, and bringing them home,
they’re bringing them in, piled on the hulls of Grants, in trucks, in convoys,
they’re zipping them up in green plastic bags,
they’re tagging them now in Saigon, in the mortuary coolness
they’re giving them names, they’re rolling them out of
the deep-freeze lockers — on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut
the noble jets are whining like hounds,
they are bringing them home
– curly heads, kinky-hairs, crew-cuts, balding non-coms,
– they’re high, now, high and higher, over the land, the steaming chow mein,
their shadows are tracing the blue curve of the Pacific
with sorrowful quick fingers, heading south, heading east,
home, home, home — and the coasts swing upward, the old ridiculous curvatures
of earth, the knuckled hills, the mangrove-swamps, the desert emptiness…
in their sterile housing they tilt towards these like skiers
– taxiing in, on the long runways, the howl of their homecoming rises
surrounding them like their last moments (the mash, the splendour)
then fading at length as they move
on to small towns where dogs in the frozen sunset
raise muzzles in mute salute,
and on to cities in whose wide web of suburbs
telegrams tremble like leaves from a wintery tree
and the spider grief swings in his bitter geometry
– they’re bringing them home, now, too late, too early.
Our Free Trial includes a GAMSAT ® Study Guide with an in-depth, day-by-day study schedule for Section 1 along with all the other sections of the GAMSAT ® exam to help you plan out your preparation. You’ll also get access to 50 MCQs from our Intelligent MCQ Bank and a wealth of other free resources.
Sign up to test our industry-leading online learning technology for yourself:
Your preparation for GAMSAT ® Section 1 should be seen as three-fold:
This will involve familiarising yourself with relevant content in the humanities and social sciences. More pertinently, it will involve setting aside time dedicated to critically evaluating and analysing this material in a manner reflective of the questions on the GAMSAT.
If you’re not sure where to start, our blog article on what to read for the humanities section of the GAMSAT exam suggests some useful reading materials to help you get familiar with GAMSAT ® Section 1 content.
Improving the pace of your reading whilst maintaining the depth and clarity of your understanding requires practice. Reading speed is largely a function of your reading habits, and it is useful to start reading regularly and engage with texts which challenge your understanding and fall outside your comfort zone.
When you approach texts or source material during your Section 1 study, do not read at the leisurely pace you might bring to a novel. Instead, take this as an opportunity to hone your skills at processing information in a rapid and efficient manner. This is not simply a matter of reading quickly, as hurriedly skimming a text will cause you to miss information that may be crucial to your analysis. It is far more efficient to read through the source material once at a reasonable pace than it is to have to revisit the material repeatedly due to insufficient comprehension.
It requires greater concentration to maintain comprehension while reading quickly, and students will often find this difficult because they have become accustomed to reading in a passive manner. It is a good idea to treat all your reading material as if it is the stem to a GAMSAT ® question . If you practice maintaining focus and attention whilst rapidly processing information, this process will seem less alien and fatiguing to you during the exam. Here it is important to note that if you struggle with maintaining concentration whilst reading quickly, your practice should emphasise accuracy and comprehension over speed.
As you read, use your finger or mouse cursor to follow the words, and pause between paragraphs to internally summarise or briefly annotate salient points. Shorthand is especially useful for facilitating greater comprehension and recall when tackling longer, information dense passages. Your notes should consist of a few words to summarise main ideas and the relationships between them.
When tackling practice MCQs for section 1, it is essential to remember that this section is as much a reasoning test as Section 3. Common to all questions is some form of ambiguity that can be resolved through scrutiny of the source material and careful logical reasoning.
Do not use pre-existing knowledge of the topic to aid your reasoning unless you cannot obtain the answer with the information in the text alone. Concepts and ideas in GAMSAT questions are defined in relation to the stem, and information may not accord with your existing knowledge of the topic. Thus, it is important to incorporate only the evidence provided in the source material when conducting your analysis.
If the reasoning to support an answer choice seems long-winded and convoluted, it is likely that a more straightforward answer choice exists. This is important to remember after you have engaged in a process of elimination and are left with two answer options, both of which seem correct in relation to the source material. Often one answer choice will either contain more information than can be gleaned from the text alone, or require complex reasoning and justification for its selection. Be wary of words like “only” and “none” which apply stringent limits on an answer choice and often entail a greater logical leap that can be inferred from the source material (e.g. it does not logically follow from the statement “therapy is associated with better mental health outcomes” that “only those who receive therapy recover from a mental illness”). Educated guessing is a useful skill to learn when you’re caught between two options. Check out our podcast episode on Using Educated Guessing in the GAMSAT Exam for more tips and tricks.
It is good to keep a Question Log to document the type of source material (e.g. poem, cartoon, fiction) and question (e.g. identifying tone, ascertaining the main argument, making inferences based on key principles) that you are struggling with. It is also a good idea to keep record of the question itself, as well as the key skills and information that is required in order to solve it. This will enable you to focus your study towards areas of weakness and revisit difficult content to ensure that your understanding has progressed.
Take GradReady’s free GAMSAT ® Practice Test to consolidate your Section 1 preparation!
It would be foolhardy to attempt to read material in the hope of encountering it again in the GAMSAT ® exam – exposing oneself to content in the hope of encountering it again in the exam is a Sisyphean task and is well beyond the abilities of mortals or any but the luckiest.
Instead, it is much more useful to consider the different types of media that you might encounter in GAMSAT ® Section 1. If you understand the basic elements of a medium as well as the techniques often utilised in them, it can help you go a long way to answering the questions.
Poetry is an increasingly diverse genre. However, the defining feature is some degree of rhythm or meter. Poetry is primarily concerned with creating effects or capturing moods through the use of language. As such, the weight of what poetry is expressing is not always explicit in the meaning of words, but rather the sounds they make, the way they are combined, or in references to other material. As such, it is important to familiarise yourself with literary techniques and poetic devices so that you can successfully identify them, and better understand their implications and imagery when you are asked questions on them. A good place to start might be the resources below:
Similar to poetry, there is an exceptionally broad variety of fiction available, and a vast array of styles. As such there is a veritable Pandora’s box of literary techniques that you may encounter. One example might be dialogue where you will be asked to identify emotional states or motivations from third person interactions. Another might be the use of irony in a situation where what appears to be the case differs wildly from actuality. Irony is a subtle device and actually an umbrella term for many devices including dramatic irony, situational irony and verbal irony. You would not go wrong to read the Wikipedia page on Irony . Similar to above, it’s important to have a solid understanding of these literary devices to allow you to successfully identify and interpret questions on them. When reading a fiction passage, it’s important to ask some key questions: Who’s point of view is it? Who are the characters? What is the structure of the passage? What happens? What are the stylistic elements? What is the tone?
The variety of non-fiction passages used in Section 1 of the GAMSAT ® exam is vast: Academic articles, autobiography, biography, essays, guides, critiques, reports, statutes, philosophy and social theory amongst others. Accordingly, the non-fiction questions generally make up the largest portion of Section 1 MCQs. Over recent years there has been a trend towards more technical and jargonistic writing - It’s important to remember that you’re not expected to have specialised knowledge in any of the fields presented to you and to avoid becoming intimidated by unfamiliar language and terms. Always aim to consider the style of the passage, the theme, and what you think the author is trying to say.
Graphic media and cartoons should not be neglected. They provide a valuable opportunity to assess the understanding of the distinction between implication and inference . A good source of practice would be satirical political cartoons in newspapers. You should endeavor to identify the message the cartoon is presenting as well as describe what each individual component of it represents. Some useful sites with free cartoons include:
The use of charts and diagrams is becoming increasingly prominent in Section 1 of the GAMSAT ®%sup exam, often used to display textual information in a visual form. Similar to preparing for Section 3, the key to preparing here is to develop a practiced approach to reading and understanding graphs and diagrams.
Section 1 of the GAMSAT ® exam may also present you with stems that consist of a single quote, asking you to identify key themes or ideas. These sorts of MCQs are quite similar to Section 2 in respect to testing this skill, and it may be helpful to prepare by practicing the exercise of theme finding.
In addition to understanding the principles behind these different types of media, working on something as basic as your vocabulary can be particularly helpful. Developing your vocabulary has multiple advantages:
Our Free Trial includes a GAMSAT ® Study Guide with an in-depth, day-by-day study schedule for Section 1 along with all the other sections of the GAMSAT ® exam to help you plan out your preparation. You’ll also get access to 50 MCQs from our Intelligent MCQ Bank and a wealth of other free resources.
Sign up to test our industry-leading online learning technology for yourself:
A common piece of advice is to read widely in order to expose yourself to different media in preparation for Section 1 of the GAMSAT ® exam. However, if this is not performed mindfully in a systematic manner, it is next to useless and may in fact harm you as it will essentially become busy work with limited gains.
It is therefore important to have in mind what you are wanting to achieve out of your readings and use these goals to ensure that you read actively.
Below are some guidelines on how to achieve this:
Nevertheless, when performed correctly, reading widely can definitely be beneficial in terms of your GAMSAT ® Preparation. In terms of what to read, this can be broken down into multiple categories. Keep in mind that any reading you do will help with both Section 1 and Section 2 of the GAMSAT ® exam.
| Type of Media | Description | Free Resources |
|---|---|---|
Newspapers |
Newspapers are perhaps one of the more obvious mediums through which you can read on a wide range of topics and issues.The newspapers listed here arguably offer some of the least biased and fairest reporting. | |
Books & Short Stories |
It’s best to aim for short texts. Aim for excellent writing with a focus on authors who have mastered the short-story modality. | |
Essays |
Again, take advantage of the shorter texts allowing you to read one a day. | |
Poetry |
Poetry is often an area that students tend to dislike, but it’s still a medium that you should familiarise yourself with. Poems are generally a lot shorter so they provide you with an opportunity to read one daily. |
|
Utilising a dictionary as you read will help develop your vocabulary, and reading is just beneficial overall to help expand your thoughts and enhance your own personal development.
Another area that can often be of value to students in their preparation is philosophy. The focus on philosophy in the GAMSAT ® exam can be tricky in terms of complex ideas and ambiguous writing. Nevertheless there are some common philosophers that may be worthwhile reading as part of your preparation. Delving into this particular topic will familiarise you with philosophical writing and introduce you to another style of writing and different ways of forming ideas.
To begin with, the following Daily Mail article is a great starting point as an introduction to famous philosophers and their theories, but you should follow up for more scholarly information. Some recommended philosophers include:
If preparing for the content should be the first pillar of our preparation, the second involves developing your exam technique and MCQ Strategy. This is important as with good technique, it is possible to get the right answer without necessarily knowing what the answer is by application of some basic statistics and educated guesswork.
MCQs are good for examiners because they can be rapidly and objectively marked. However, there are some benefits for examinees as well. This is because their very design can be taken advantage of. What’s more, the individuals applying the formula to write these questions are victims of the same fallacies and foibles as any other person. If these can be identified then they can also be exploited.
The first thing to appreciate is how MCQs are written. By doing so it is easier to take advantage of their flaws:
So, as you can see, with a keen eye for inconsistencies you can very quickly narrow your acceptable answers down.
However, this will not get you 100% of the way. What follows is a method for approaching each and every MCQ that will further increase your odds of arriving at the correct option.
Read the question, i.e. the task you need to complete to answer the question correctly. Nothing will save you from choosing the wrong answer if you misread the question and so this step is essential. Not only this, but it will prime your mind on what to look for in the stem.
Not only will this also prime your mind on what to look for in the stem, it will also demonstrate the way in which your mind should be working. It will give you key words and grammatical cues to look for in the stem such as the difference between “an” and “a.”
Through the combination of these two you should be able to identify the objective of the question, i.e. what knowledge or skill they are testing. For example, even though you may be asked about what a certain phrase means, what it is actually assessing is your ability to understand the concept of metaphor.
As you are reading you should be able to identify elements that lend towards one or more options being the answer, and elements that detract from one or more of the options. You can then tally at the end to see which answer is the most likely. Couple this with your ability to rule out obvious detractors and your statistical odds alone, and you improve your chances of getting the right option.
For further tips and advice make sure you sign up for our GAMSAT ® Free Trial to watch a recording of our GAMSAT ® Section 1 Workshop - Check out the 12 minute excerpt below
We’ve provided quite a few tips on how to prepare for GAMSAT® Section 1. If you’re finding it difficult to keep track of all the information, download this free GAMSAT® Section 1 preparation checklist PDF file today. It’ll help organise your Section 1 studies to be more effective and efficient.
As always, it’s useful to have a solid understanding of how GAMSAT ® scores work in general, and our guide is a great place to start. The same percentiles that apply to the overall exam scores apply to the specific section scores. As such, a score of roughly 59 will place you around the 50th percentile, that is to say the average score for Section 1. A score of around 65 will place you at around the 75th percentile, or the top 25% of students, and as such, 65 and above is typically a good place to aim. That said, what determines a good score for Section 1 is highly dependent on your performance across the other sections of the exam. Section 1 is typically a difficult section for most students, and as such, a lower score can be deemed ‘good enough’ provided you do well in other sections to counterbalance a low Section 1 score.
Your ‘good score’ is also dependent upon the university for which you are applying. Whilst the university cutoffs may be low, the average mark for acceptance at a particular university may be significantly higher and will vary from institution to institution. If in doubt, the best course of action is to contact the universities for which you are applying and inquire directly about your chances of acceptance.
Everything you need to know about the GAMSAT ® exam from structure and overview to which universities require the GAMSAT ® .
Covers everything you need to know about your GAMSAT ® Results - How the scoring works, result release dates and even GAMSAT ® score cutoffs.
A breakdown of how to approach study effectively and how to set up a GAMSAT ® study schedule.
An overview of what to expect in Section 2 of the GAMSAT ® exam, how to prepare and how to perfect your essay technique.
An overview of what to expect in Section 3 of the GAMSAT ® exam and how to prepare for each of the topics – Biology, Chemistry, & Physics.
Tips on how to prepare for the GAMSAT ® if you come from a non-science background.
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