all right 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 is emil and i scored in the 99th percentile on the ucat in 2020 and this video is the second video of my youcat crash course sponsored by med entry 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 a hundred percent 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 med entry is the youcat 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 med entry 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 color 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 um 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 you know 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 straight 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 in the back of the line and then i know i'll just use letters to denote the people's names so i've got j he's three centimeters taller than pragan dash so that's p lance is seven centimeters shorter than evan and pagan dash is one centimeter 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 centimeter difference here then you have justin is three centimeters shorter than pragan dash so this is three and then you know that lance is seven centimeters 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 pragendesh 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 that 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 fifty percent of the people who do death bound jobs suffer from heart ailments they tell you that most people who do death bound 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 desbound 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 disease 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 their chance of heart related diseases so that would probably be yes people having proper physical activities will not have heart ailments so this is no because it only reduces the chance doesn't reduce it to zero so this would be no so here you can say it's pretty easy to just go quickly between the question and the stimulus and once you understand it it's often really really easy to get the correct answer to these questions and as you can see we got all of those questions right and we'll move on to the next question type which will be the strongest argument so 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 so 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 so 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 um respond to all of these aspects of the question so i am agreeing 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 i recommend here is to just go from 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 babo than there are students using myspace so here i want to look at okay what is bibo on the legend it's the cross and what is my space 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 bibo 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 my space it's going to be 1 plus 42 plus 13. so that's going to be around 56. with bibo i know it's going to be 19 plus 11 plus 5 which is going to be less so a is not true so b there are more students using only friend friendstar 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 see there are fewer students using both wechat and bibo then there are students that uses myspace so here i'll see both wechat and baybo so we've got bibo is the cross and wechat is the square and we see that this is going to be 27 plus 3 plus 4 just 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 michael as a chess player deciding on which strategy you use queen's gambit or roy lopez you see if he uses queen's gambit there's a 35 chance that he'll play true defensively if he uses the rui lopez there's a six in 20 chance he'll play two defensively and then he has a 30 chance of not gaining a stable position if he uses the roy 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 realize is that the majority of these questions will have true probabilities that are exactly the same so in this question what you see is that if he uses the queen's gambit this 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 roy lopez so now you have a look at the answer options and you see what is the answer the question actually asking you see considering only the chance that mchale 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 the bat 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 six in 20 i know is gonna be three and ten which is thirty percent so if he uses the rui lopez there's a lower chance that he will play two defensively which means that the queen's gambit is not the better strategy so he has a reduced likelihood of playing two defensively with the roy lopez and that's how you do these probability questions no there's a 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