UCAT Timing structure
The UCAT assesses a range of cognitive abilities necessary for entry into medical and dental school. The test is 2 hours and consists of five separately timed subtests in multiple-choice format.
By knowing the timing structure, you can determine how long to spend on one question, or whether to flag the question and move on. The timings for each subtest are as such:
| UCAT Section | Timing per section | Timing per question |
|---|---|---|
| Verbal Reasoning | 21 minutes (+ 1 minute of reading) | 28 seconds per item |
| Quantitative Reasoning | 24 minutes (+1 minute of reading) | 40 seconds per item |
| Abstract Reasoning | 13 minutes (+1 minute of reading) | 14 seconds per item |
| Decision Making | 32 minutes (+1 minute of reading) | 66 seconds per item |
| Situational Judgement | 26 minutes (+1 minute of reading) | 23 seconds per item |
Timing tip
It’s important to always keep an eye on the time, especially when you are halfway through. This will tell you if you need to speed up, slow down, or spend some more time triaging through questions.
UCAT Timer Tool
The UCAT timer is designed to help you practice your timings to ensure you complete questions within the strict UCAT time limits.
INSTRUCTIONS
Practising with question banks in books such as ISC medical and Kaplan can be an amazing way to prepare for your UCAT exam. Timing can however become an issue since books don’t have timers built in.
I created this to use alongside practice with question banks from books. When you start revising with question banks, it’s important to do it untimed to familiarise yourself with the different question types.
When you are ready to work on speed, that’s when you need this page. It is essentially a UCAT specific timer to save you messing with generic timers on your phone and internet.
This is a simple stopwatch that can also tell you how quick you do each question.
When practising, set aside 30 mins with a goal to practice 10 questions. With the stopwatch you can hit N after every question to see how long it took you.
The C key resets everything.
The Space key starts and pauses the watch.
This is for when you are practising a full test with a book. You have the option to adopt full timing, UCATSEN timing, or timing for if you wish to just do half an exam (half the questions).
The progress bar shows you how much time you have used and how much you have left.
The question number simply tells you which question you should be on based on how many questions you have to do and how much time you have left.
Only use the question number as an indication of halfway. Some questions will be easier and some harder so they won’t all take the same time to complete.
This is essentially the same as the countdown timer with the added option of being able to choose how many questions you are doing and how long each question should take you.
This is brilliant for when you are just starting out practising your speed and timings but you don’t want to do proper exam conditions (i.e 44 questions in VR @ ~30s per question).
You can start off nice and easy by maybe setting yourself 10 Verbal Reasoning questions from a book, and aiming to complete each in 50s rather than 30s.
Simply input 10 in the Question section and 50 in the Custom Timing section to generate a countdown timer that runs for 8 mins and tells you which question you should be on.
Happy revising!
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Hey, Thank you for putting up some free resources and tips.
I am currently also using UCAT books and the timer definitely makes things easier. 🙂 🙂
I find VR so challenging :/
Thanks for kind words! When I first created it I didn’t think anyone would find use for it so I’m glad somebody is! With VR, seems like practice is key. It’s so time-restricted and everyone struggles with it. maybe this video will help if you haven’t seen it yet.