Section I

The Written Communication and Verbal Reasoning course seeks to emphasise the skills of critical thinking and logic, but also sensitivity to the emotional nuances of words and information. These are of course essential to a medical career, and almost all medical departments now use tests which seek to assess how, regardless of academic background, a person might approach a patient, or process information of different kinds.

Our course will introduce key characteristics of the Section I paper, such as underlying structure and rationale, cascades, red herrings, and verbal camouflage. Students will also be shown the techniques behind the questions used by examiners to enhance the difficulty of multiple-choice examinations. One part of the course features an exercise involving the construct of questions from carefully chosen extracts of data, and thereby gain an insight into the minds of, and limits upon, the examiners.

These and other integral features relating to critical thinking and linguistic reasoning are followed by an in-depth analysis of examples. These have been carefully constructed and added to over the years to produce insights and to reinforce techniques. The course is accompanied by one thousand simulated questions with full detailed explanatory answers.

Section II

There is an inner logic to the GAMSAT, which consists of testing two fundamental types of intelligence. This is most easily seen in the “Written Communication” paper. Section A requires the candidate to write an analytical essay dealing with ideas, which tests intellectual intelligence. Section B requires the candidate to write a personalised essay dealing with inter-personal issues, which tests emotional intelligence. This matches the skills required by an effective medical practitioner, who has to analyse symptoms (intellectual intelligence) and simultaneously manage the people who present those symptoms (emotional intelligence).

Section A

You will need to develop a "universal model" for successful analytical essay writing and are develop the techniques of analysing questions or statements, and using information. This covers the skills of “questioning the question”, exploiting hidden opportunities, constructing arguments, dealing with emergencies, editing and timing and various other strategies.

Section A Example Essay

Section B

For section B you will need to consider the use of completely different techniques for writing the more "expressive" personalised essays that the exam requires, together with an analysis of some successful examples in the history of the genre. This allows the planning for specific titles, as a way of building on the knowledge derived from your verbal reasoning experiences

Section B Example Essay