welcome back what i wanted to do in this one is to make a relatively short one just to go through a bunch of different free resources that i used and some that i wish i had found uh before i started preparing for it i actually found some of these afterwards in researching this and then also just from having conversations with people and following along with what other people are doing as well there's a lot of free resources that are actually available even though the ace material is the best material as i always say you don't necessarily have to pay for particular resources i know i didn't i only paid for the ac material and that was it and it served me pretty well i know as well the people that are sitting in the second time you may have already exhausted some of this and are looking for new material so that's what we're going to do is just go through some of the free resources that are actually useful as well not just like junk material or anything for each of the three sections and i'll break that down i'll have all the links at the bottom you can check each of them out as we go through them so the first one is in section one uh something that i did use and that seemed to work relatively well was actually doing these gap papers so as a tutor like i'm already pretty familiar with this test if you're not familiar in victoria year 12 students or people sitting here 12 subject exams have to sit something called the general achievement test or the gat and it basically just tests their general comprehension literacy and numeracy skills as well as some technical skills that are used to kind of derive an exam score if they weren't able to sit their actual subject exams for section one though it's really useful because there are passages that you have to read and then it asks you questions based on comprehension or analysis or inference from them it's a little bit easier than the section one material you get in the actual gamsat but if you do it at a slightly faster pace than they suggest they usually get two hours and suggested two hours to do 75 total questions not all of them are section one related so you do have to kind of sift through them but i would say try to give yourself uh maybe kind of three to four minutes per stem also they work on stems and you have multiple questions so it's very very similar in layout and it's all multi-choice as well and it's a good place to start because it's probably a little bit easier than section one material but it is relevant to it so you can kind of grade and work your way up the second one that i used was the uk bmat i've talked about this before mostly in relation to section three but you can also do it for section one again somewhat similar questions but it often has more than four options which is different to gamsat and i found the passages are very kind of they're almost all technical and a lot of them are very topical as well they don't necessarily go into like philosophical texts or anything so a little bit kind of off in terms of the focus but good just for drilling the skill of reading quickly and taking on new information as well they do have some tricky questions in there so they're worth having a look at and then finally probably a more valuable one is read theory this is something that i didn't really use leading into it i hadn't heard about it but i just for whatever reason didn't actually look into it i just focused mostly on the acer material read theory is kind of it's a free website where you can just create an account you can read different passages it'll ask you a bunch of questions and quiz you on it very very similar to the skills that you're applying in section one and it does all the way from like primary age stuff which i would hope no one really needs to use but and it works you up and i think it does like a diagnostic test as well to see where you're at and then you can slowly make improvement and the text gets slowly harder and harder it's great because it's a free resource that's the main thing section two so uh there's a website called aeon i think it is which has a bunch of essays written on really big picture topics that are very very relevant to section two probably pick up a lot in terms of how to actually form arguments and positions on things and it exposes you to unique positions it's very long form it's probably a little bit highbrow in terms of the sophistication level of the language but if that's something you're interested in it's worth checking out i'll link some of those in my email newsletter as well because any that i think are particularly useful um are a good read to go through the other one is the conversation you've probably heard of the conversation before so it's largely it's an australian media outlet or website that has mostly opinionated political articles on social and political issues it again puts them in a very very straightforward manner it's always fact-based so you can build up a lot of research while reading and learning how to justify and support opinions you've probably already heard this one so i won't spend a lot of time on it but check it out if you haven't already the other one is the crash course youtube channel i found this one to be really really helpful for kind of really rapidly building up my knowledge of uh philosophy and history as well they've got playlists on both of those so i'll link those uh in terms of the science stuff you might find they do a lot of crash course biology and everything i'd say it's probably a little bit too basic for what you need for gamsat and it's again a little bit more theory based than it is reasoning based so you can check it out but um i don't think that's as helpful but their history and philosophy stuff they're like 10 minutes long they introduce you to a concept or a thought and then break it all down and a lot of the time it's about actually building up the knowledge of it so i find that they're quite helpful and then finally i'll plug my own thing because it's it's uh free anyway i'm not trying to sell it or anything like that is thursday thoughts my weekly newsletter where i curate a bunch of different reading material every single week and then offer my own opinions on different topics it's usually themed every single week across either task a or b topics and usually write a small intro or a sample argument and things like that to give people a bit of reference along with weekly prompts a set of four relevant to that theme just kind of does some of the research for you so moving on to section three this one's where i know people are really looking for a lot of material so the first one is uk bmat again same link you can go through all the past papers and everything section two is the science end it's again very different in focus the questions are a little bit stranger but i use them just for pacing practice as i've mentioned previously another one is if you want to go through high school level uh chemistry exams so i'll link the vc there's probably hsc equivalents and things but i know the vc well the vc chemistry and biology exams just the multiple choice some of them are technical so you don't want to do all of them and it does mean you have to sift through them but there are a lot particularly with chemistry to do with like ph pka that kind of thing ranking things making assumptions and inferences are quite good and the bio exam as well has a lot of stuff that's testing experimental design methodology as well which we know is now coming up in section 3 2. obviously probably going to be a little bit easier because it's not supposed to be a reasoning test those exams they're more about technical knowledge and memorization of things but it is again a good way just to test that skill if you don't want to burn through the ace material too quickly then google scholar this one doesn't have questions but i'm sure you've used google scholar before to do research for assignments and things like that and lit reviews so i use this whenever i was trying to practice a particular skill i would go to raw research and i would try to understand the information i usually go to their graphs and tables and their results sections try to absorb the information and see if i can make inferences off of that and i would check if my conclusions were right by then reading the abstract or the conclusion see how close i was it's a really really good thing to do just to kind of get used to taking on foreign and unusual information another one is unilevel chemistry worksheets so i did this all the time whenever i was making errors i would just google that topic just write worksheet pdf into google pulls up a bunch of freely available worksheets from universities and courses and things like that it is skills and theory based not necessarily reasoning based but there is some theory that is assessed or at least utilized in the test so i would do that all the time i did that for a lot of organic and stereotypes i've linked one example below they often have solutions on them as well but you can literally just google the topic worksheet into google it pulls up a bunch of them and you can just do that and then uh finally would just be this channel and my resources page you've probably already seen it but if you're new to it then you may not be aware i've linked it at the bottom i do free questions sample questions that i then make walkthrough videos on with work solutions they're linked in it and i basically do my best to try and emulate the actual acer test as well and so this is really just based off of the fact that i know that people are looking for more and more material all the time the acer material burns out really quickly there's not enough material available a lot of it is paid which kind of sucks and it's generally not very good quality my hope is that the stuff that i'm writing is of higher quality and closer at least to matching the acer content as well making it freely available means that people have better access to it and therefore can better prepare so check that out if you haven't already everything that i do is all available on that resources page at the moment so you can check that out as well and that's it so those are all of the free resources that at least i'm aware of if there are any that you know of that you want to share let me know put it in the comments and hopefully this has helped and has massively increased the resources that are now available to you without having to break the bank in fact not having to touch the bank at all keep saving your money don't give acer any more money than they already have apart from maybe still using their practice material definitely don't put any money into the pockets of the private companies because it's an absolute ripoff in my opinion anyway i won't rant i will see you [Music]