hi guys welcome back to the channel today we're going to be discussing how i prepared for the imad now this video is going to be basically my personal experience with it as well as tips and tricks that i've gathered from interviewing and talking to dozens and hundreds of students over the last five years but this is going to be the first video in a series of videos and articles about preparation for the imat because it's been five years since i've done it the format has changed so i want to actually also ask people who also scored a lot better than me but also who did it a lot more recently we can really really bring you a lot of good information on how you prepare especially for the heroes of paro once they're done with their exams uh they're going to be able to like give us a lot better information than i ever could but regardless today what we're going to discuss is first of all the general strategy that i would recommend second my personal situation so what timing did i have what was my foundation and what my score was i'm going to briefly go over each of the sections and how to prepare for them then we're going to move on to what sources i would recommend including do i recommend any courses and then finally we're going to like talk briefly about the most important considerations that most students just seem to ignore for some reason so starting with the general strategy that i recommend is to focus on your strengths and then plan for your weaknesses and the most important thing to consider here is how much time do you have left until the imat at the time of the recording there is like eight months left to the imat there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to do the entire syllabus and cover it and prepare for every single part of it okay but if you have you know two weeks left and physics is like your absolute worst like you can't do any math then it's probably not worth trying to you know recover a few marks from physics what you should do in that case is maximize uh what your best areas are so depending on how much time you have left you should be able to cover everything and while you are covering everything you should be testing yourself continuously so it's not just enough to do the past papers and then you know once you get like something wrong you just like okay whatever and then move on to the next question or when you're studying and you're constantly reading this new material there's no point in you just cons like continuously going through the entire syllabus and not testing yourself at all so as you cover everything which you really should be covering everything in the syllabus again there's so much time left you should be continuously testing yourself before you start a new chapter you should go and test yourself on you know like bmat questions on that topic and see like how much do you know it's okay if you haven't started you haven't done any study you need to start somewhere like studies have shown that if you actually test yourself before you even start learning it is actually very advantageous because then once you start studying you'll like recall the questions and the stems and see like how they want you to think about learning the material so you should be continuously testing yourself and you should be covering all of the material again focusing in on your strengths and trying to like bring up your weaknesses as much as possible the next one is that you should really really use the past questions strategically so if there are past 10 past exams and you have 20 weeks what you should do is you should every single week sit one of the exams starting from number one to number 10 in exact test conditions okay i'm talking you go into a room you have like a clock you don't bring your phone and you have the paper printed out you have a timer you have like i'm talking exact same conditions every single week and you do that twice if you have 20 weeks if you only have 10 weeks then you do one every single week you know we don't know yet if the exam what day of the week is going to be or what date it's going to be but generally if you know the exam is on a thursday every thursday from now until the exam you should do a past exam okay every time you finish a past exam you need to go through the questions and see what topics you got wrong and when you see what you got wrong you don't just move on you go and you re-study that entire thing right you see why you got it wrong if you were to do that again do you understand how to get it correctly don't just check what was the correct answer you know and then once you do two or three weeks in a row compare like each of the questions you're getting wrong is it always in one particular topic is it always genetics and biology because that shows that fundamentally you are not understanding you are not grasping something if you are consistently getting genetics questions wrong this is going to show your weakness and depending on how much time you have you can like redo all of genetics from the start uh the other thing is once you start doing all of the past papers and you do all of them before you actually get to the imat date itself you're going to see that there are types of questions that are continuously repeating themselves you know and in this way you can identify what are the high-yield topics there's this thing called a parietal principle which pretty much says that like uh 20 sorry 80 percent of the results comes from 20 of the material because they're just constantly repeating question types repeating topics and so the more experience you have using the past paper strategically the better you can tackle the high-yield thing which is going to get you most of the points next is you need to understand basic mcq strategies because the imat not only is testing your knowledge it's actually testing your strategy as well if you think about it logically you only have to answer half of the questions correctly only half of the questions correctly to guarantee yourself a spot in most of the universities okay if you get no other questions wrong and you answer half of them correctly you will get a score that will pretty much get you into most universities except for the top ones the thing is though most students don't understand how to approach this exam strategically so they start guessing things they start like just answering things they don't do timing drills you know they don't understand how it works like probability wise for example if you are in the middle of a test and a question is taking too long do you just guess like one out of the four sorry one out of the five answers do you just guess one or is it better to try to eliminate two and then take a guess you have to like make up a strategy you need to like research these strategies and have one before you go into the exam because again the imat is not only testing your knowledge it's testing your knowledge under pressure the other thing that you have to have to have to get good at is timing okay every single year two things that i see most often is people are crying because they weren't paying attention while they were filling out the uh like the answer sheet and you know one thing slid and their entire grid is down which means that basically all of their answers are going to be invalid and two they didn't have time to finish the test okay now i'm not saying why someone might not have time to finish the test but most of the time i'm willing to bet is because they didn't have a strategy from all of the past times they did it okay they didn't go into it knowing okay what i'm going to do is i'm going to try every question sequentially and then i'm going to go back over the ones i wasn't sure or maybe you want to be like okay i'm going to start from my strongest section where i can secure the most points and then i'll go over my weak things the thing is there is no like one right ultimate strategy but the point is that you need to have a strategy before you go in and you need to not change in the middle of the exam okay you don't you don't change the horse that you're betting on during the race or something there's some there's some very important phrase like that that you don't change the horse that you're betting on halfway through the race and that is so so important so you need to be continuously running timing drills you need to come up with a strategy and you need to be able to get yourself to read a question and know if you're going to be able to solve it under a certain time like if you look at that question and you think it's going to take you five minutes to eliminate one answer it is not worth it you need to skip that question because again you technically only have to answer half of the questions correctly to get into somewhere okay mcq strategies time drills doing past questions all of these are so so so important in creating your imat strategy which is what's going to get you in so understanding the strategies better is also going to help you understand whether you should risk answering a question or not and the final thing that i wanted to mention in the strategy thing is that a lot of the questions that they ask and they repeat actually have like tricks and tips to solving them especially the section one questions there are almost always shortcuts to answering uh certain types of questions now there is a really good logical reasoning book which i'm going to put uh the link in the description and in the first comment and this book teaches you a lot of the really good strategies on how to approach logical reasoning because again like a lot of question types including also in the maths and chemistry section that seem very complicated there's usually like a simple tip or a simple trick that allows you to shortcut answering the question so these are all things that you're only going to learn by continuously doing question types and you know when you answer a question incorrectly not just looking at what the correct one was but understanding why you got it incorrectly and what was the exact thing you needed to do to actually get it correctly okay this all all of this builds into a very very solid strategy and these are all the things that i did for my personal situation so talking about my personal situation my score was 48.6 because this is like one of the most asked questions i get i prepared for the exam in exactly two months i had two full months to prepare for it because before that i was in full-time employment i was out of high school i think like four years at the stage i was like working in facebook actually and i decided to quit my job i think it was like mid-june i had to serve out my notice i started mid-july preparing and i sat the exam in mid-september and the reason like okay my score isn't excellent it's definitely not like in the 60s or 50s like a lot of people but i feel like my score is pretty good considering i only stayed for two months and the reason my score i feel was really good was because i had a very solid strap and a very very solid strategy uh going in i'm gonna try holding him and see if that helps uh i sat this exam with also a lot of other people i know that tried this exam afterwards who are also like a lot smarter than me i didn't get the score because i'm intelligent or not i'm actually quite dumb like i'm dumb as rocks and these were the students who were explaining concepts like these friends are the people who were explaining things to me before we would go into tests in high school together but the reason why i got higher scores than them is not because i'm smarter than them it's just because i went in with a clearer strategy a clearer mind and i was feeling a lot more confident uh going in that day so again i cannot like emphasize enough how important your strategy is now i'm pretty happy with the way i prepared uh however i would like to point out that i did not actually know how to study back then i'm pretty sure if i had two months now to study for the exam i would like get a much much higher score because i didn't exactly know how to study then i was just really strategic about my preparation the thing that i would do differently this time around is 100 using flashcards i did not understand the value of flashcards until like my second year of medical school which i highly regret so the one thing i would do differently is 100 to start using flashcards more effectively and the second one is using question banks from other tests uh because when i was preparing for it i think there were only six past papers which was fine because i only had two months to prepare but i have heard from a lot of people that the bmat questions are actually very very similar so if i was doing it differently now i would definitely use flashcards and i would definitely use like bmat question banks and uh there's apparently a really good book which again i will link this all in the description for you so that's what i would do differently because otherwise when i came up with my solid like strategy of comparing my test results like week after week and seeing what areas i was getting incorrectly and you know finding a timing drill and my mcq like risk tolerance like was the probability i would solve a question what are the tips and tricks to each type of question um the only thing i would actually do differently is use flashcards and use question banks now i'm going to briefly go over each of the sections and like just very very briefly talk about it because again we're having like a lot more detailed guides and a lot more expert people uh talk about this than i am going to but briefly let's talk about each of the sections and what's a good way to prepare for each of the parts so starting with logical reasoning and general knowledge really um i got full marks on a logical reasoning and that's because i came from a test that i sat when i when i was a teenager called the hpat which is in ireland which is logical reasoning on steroids so the only way to prepare for the hpat for that is to just keep solving questions and to really use that cambridge book like it is really really so good but there are also other resources because the question types again are repeated so the best way to prepare for logical reasoning is use that book use the past questions and learn these like tips and tricks and strategies like understand what the question is asking for you uh if you're really interested i could like over the next few months try to throw together a logical reasoning guide um but i'm not sure so i'd maybe let me know in the comments because i'm kind of hesitant to do preparation materials but if that's something that you really really want please let me know because a logical reason is actually the one part that i feel very confident about but again the whole thing comes literally down to what are the question types what is the question asking for you what is the strategy that's all general knowledge the truth is there's not really a lot you can do for general knowledge like it's called general knowledge for a reason it's not something that you can cram for now one of the heroes of padova vinnie he got i think basically a perfect general knowledge score i don't remember and uh he has very kindly agreed to let me interview him for the podcast um and this is great so he's going to give you a lot better advice than i would but i think a fun way to prepare for general knowledge would be to play those trivia games you know the ones you can get on your phone and it asks you like trivia pursuit and things like that like i think if you know there is no real um way to cram for it but i think if you wanted something like a fun past-time way to prepare for it i think playing trivia games uh like on one of those apps could be fun second is just reading in general and three there are some high-yield topics like they do tend to love like european history and politics and you know some uh cultural like arts and media and things like that so there are some ways that you could maximize how you prepare for it but in my experience there is no way to cram general knowledge because again it's just like basically how you've lived how active reader you are how like do you keep up events and history and things like that now i might be completely wrong i'm very happy to wait for vinnie to actually give us the real strategy and see if there is a tip or trick to it but generally i think you can't cram for it so there's no point in like wasting any time or emotional energy trying to prepare for it i think the best way is just play the games on the app and just you know read wikipedia pages about like nato and the eu and the parliament and you know these other like world organizations like who and unesco and things like that because yeah i think that's the only way really you're gonna maximize your chances there's no way to really comfort next is biology now there is this like interesting pyramid thing that i saw where like biology chemistry and physics and maths the way you prefer prepare for each of them actually is completely opposite so for example biology is basically a brute memorization type of subject you know there is not there is some level of understanding that will help you solve questions but in general biology is a very brute memorization and so this is where things like flashcards and diagrams with image occlusion this is like where that is going to come in the most handy because biology is generally like you know it or you don't that's it now when it comes to chemistry it's kind of in between biology and physics where there are certain like ways to learn how to solve questions but a lot of it is also like root memorization it's kind of in between uh memorizing and solving and then physics is basically like just solving just learning how to solve now research has shown that uh just solving maths and physics questions is actually very very effective way to learn it but that doesn't actually really work for biology for biology it's honestly just self-testing it's using flash cards and it's just group memorization now there are certain things where you need to conceptually understand like for example you know when you're solving the little mendelian squares the punnett squares that sure to a certain degree is just memorization but that is also understanding so biology use flashcards use diagrams understand concepts so that you know it's easier to memorize them when it comes to chemistry again like i see people being like should i memorize every value in the periodic table like no of course not that is not what they're asking at all but there are certain things that you should like root memorize like the properties of you know uh the first column and the second one and the third one and like what are like the different blocks and what you know like these are things that you should learn but also you need to practice solving things like redox equations and wow it has been so long since i've done chemistry but like le chatelier's principle and you're the acid-base equations you need to practice practice practice practice and also make sure that you are memorizing the right amount of information so for chemistry just keep practicing do flash cards for like you know the properties of things and you know certain values and maybe even like uh the steps to how to solve an equation but then you need to actually apply that by solving equations and trying lots of past papers and understanding where you're going wrong and writing other things like that when it comes to physics it is literally just solve solve solve solve solve solves all that's it like literally all research has shown that homework is basically a very useful like useless tool like more and more research and academia showing that homework is actually very very ineffective except in the case of maths maths is the only place where it's shown that actually continuously solving questions by yourself is actually a very effective way to learn it now the other thing is when you look at the past papers of the imat especially at the maths and physics section there are question types that they love to repeat so even if you hate maths and physics right you can just find out what the 20 of the syllabus they're asking for 80 of the marks and then you just keep solving that question type you come up with a strategy you come up with you know like if they're asking the one with the balance and you know the gravity and it's been a while since i've done these but you know the exact question i'm talking about you need to come up with a system like okay first write down forces then write up forces you need to come up with a strategy and the only way you're going to do this is just by continuously solving questions now physics literally has the least amount of points in the entire paper so personally i would just focus on the high-yield stuff but again you have a lot of time so yeah that's basically a very quick commentary on each section but you know i might be completely wrong i might be completely dumb it has been five years since i've done this so i'm looking forward to other more knowledgeable and higher score people to actually correct me on this hopefully so next is what resources would i recommend uh first of all youtube i really think youtube is your best friend there is nothing on the internet these days that we cannot learn for free and i think there are great channels out there that will teach you anything you need to know about any single subject so ones that i particularly remember that i really liked also maybe in my first year of medical school was the chemistry tutor i not a huge fan of khan academy i know unpopular opinion i'm actually not a huge fan but i do remember they had like one or two golden videos that really helped me in you know their sea of 10 000 videos so a little bit khan academy crash course was amazing i loved crash course like just you know when i was sitting eating breakfast sometimes i would watch one or two of their videos and be like oh i remember learning this okay and like it was just like bring everything together and it was like such a like a rapid digestive format and the final one is ak lectures now i discovered ak lectures in my first year but i find that like he's like a really really great lecturer so aka lectures for sure i think like these youtube channels and i'm sure in the last five years many more and amazing ones have popped up but these are the main youtube channels that i would recommend when it comes to the books i really really recommend that cambridge one um the logical reasoning one which again i'll put in the description and generally when we're talking about science books that we recommend we always recommend the cambridge a level ones and the reason for this is because the exam the imag exam is prepared by cambridge right and it's meant to be similar to like a uk italian level of syllabus so a lot of the questions they use are going to be in the format that they prepared their own exams so i really feel like their own books are logically the best ones to prepare from when i was preparing i didn't quite use the cambridge books i used my books from ireland including my high school notes and then when i noticed that there was a gap from my irish syllabus you know because i was getting questions wrong i would then go on to wikipedia i would go onto youtube and if very necessary i would then open an a level book and see what was missing and generally i would find exactly the thing that i got wrong exactly in the a level book so i think that's a really good strategy and those are generally the resources uh that i recommend as well as now the be matte book now i didn't use this when i was preparing but again it was five years ago i had a very limited amount of time and like it just wasn't an option for me but now i have heard hundreds of students like literally when i was talking to the first years almost all of them said that they used this bmat 700 book to prepare so i would really also recommend that on top of using the cambridge a level books and the youtube channels wikipedia i don't think there's anything else that i would like is particularly jumping out about me the final thing i want to touch on is courses um i get asked all the time if i would recommend an imad course and i'm going to try to work this delicately but i have not yet heard of a course that people have been happy about is all i'm going to say and i think you know if you go on to especially uh the medical school uh subreddit which i'm also a mod on um you can if you search up like the imac course reviews and things like that you will find reviews again that are like pages long speaking about them and after reading on these which i never comment on um i just cannot like with a clean conscious conscience i recommend any courses that's all i'm going to say about it personally i do not recommend any courses not because i personally have experience with it i just can't i just have not heard of one that people came out of being like yes i really felt it was worth the money um so personally i don't recommend any courses i know like dozens hundreds of students like i would actually say i don't know that many students that used the course and were happy with it and finally the most important things the most important things that students never ever ever want to follow i don't know why don't chase a certain score but chase doing your best okay and i know this sounds really really counter-intuitive but if you keep aiming on i'm going to get a 60 i want to get a 60 that's like my whole plan and i'm going to get 60 because a 60 isn't going to be enough that is a really bad strategy to have because if you get in on the day and the questions are particularly hard and you have your mindset that you're going to get the 60 you're going to start panicking and trying to like you know answer more questions so you can get higher points instead of minimizing the incorrect answers you're going to get okay and especially because like i get the question all the time like is x score enough we don't know because i feel like a lot of people don't understand how the scoring in the imat works like if i get 80 but everyone else in the universities i applied to got 81 it means i won't get in with an 80. so it doesn't matter what score i'm aiming for what i need to aim for is doing my best and answering as many questions correctly and i know it kind of sounds like the same thing but like i guarantee you it is not because if i'm going in with the idea and the attitude that i'm going to answer as many correctly when i'm sitting down and i'm reading a question i'm going to be a lot more cool and logical like am i able to answer this correctly probably not okay maybe i'll come back to it later versus okay i need to get a 60 which means i need to get this mini correct and which means okay i'm going to answer every single one of these correct and if it's not correct i'm going to guess okay and i know this is a really really subtle difference but the people who understand the difference like is going to it's i i just i promise you it makes a huge difference if you approach it with like a process focused like a process oriented focus versus a outcome-dependent focus and so this is the first thing don't chase a result or don't chase a score just really chase doing your best and i know it sounds cliche but like you can only control your income you can't control the outcome second confidence is key right like when you go in on the day you want to be as confident and cool and collected as you can be you don't want to start panicking and rushing and then fill out your questionnaire incorrectly or skip a question or you know get thrown off by one bad question and then like you don't have time to solve the other ones so confidence is key and i don't mean like you need to fake it like you're going to be like yeah i'm going to go in and i'm going to answer every single one correctly but you know just sitting and telling yourself like okay like i have done an exam every single week in exact exam conditions this is no different there is no reason for me to be anxious i'm just gonna go in and i'm going to look at all the questions and see how it goes right because then when you sit down and you see a really hard question you're gonna be like wow okay like probably everyone is finding this question hard okay maybe i'll come back to it or you know what maybe i'll just try it like but if you are confident and you are calm and you're collected and you realize that every week you have prepared for this and you know maybe you didn't prepare to a hundred percent but realizing that like you're the only teammate you have in that situation is really like i think in a way relieving and you're not going to panic as much and when you walk out of the exam for better or for worse i promise you you're going to feel a lot better because when you're sitting there there's nothing you can change you can't change oh i should have done this and i should have done that yeah but you didn't so there's no point in hating yourself you just have to work with yourself from that point on and i i swear like confidence and faking it till you make it to a certain degree uh is going to make the world of difference because you're not going to panic and you're going to be able to like think a lot more clear and calculated and strategically and now the final point because this is turning into a documentary is you need to look after your body and you know i understand no one wants to think that like sleep and nutrition and exercise is that important but you know there's a reason why everyone preaches it to you like if you look into any sort of like learning physiology or the neuroscience behind it like almost all of them will point out to the fact that you need to have good sleep you need to have good nutrition and you need to exercise consistently now if you only have two weeks to study for the exam it's probably not a great time to start running a marathon every single day but you know depending on how much time you have i think starting to cut out sugar making sure you get eight hours of sleep a night and you know uh just like going for like even a walk an hour's walk every single day because again like studies have shown that exercise in particular releases something called bdnf which is brain derived neurotropic factor which is basically growth hormone for the neurons in your brains okay sleep is the only time memory consolidation happens when you are sleeping it is the only time you can process your memories and actually consolidate them and understand how to use that information so you know when you're thinking i'll just stay up late or oh i'll just pull in all nighter and i'll just study more yeah that's like actually the worst thing you can do because your memories are not going to consolidate so exercise sleep and usually nutrition ties it all together you know if you have a really bad diet and you're like feeling like crappy and lethargic all the time it's not going to help with your sleep it's not going to help to exercise so trying i'm not saying like you have to only eat salads but i'm saying like cutting back on the processed foods you eat i promise you will make a huge huge huge difference so that being said that kind of ties up my general advice for the exam again this is like us like covering 10 of it and like this is only the start people who are way smarter than me people who have scored way better are going to give you way better guides and so until then i would really recommend that you sign up for the newsletter or follow us on instagram or you know turn on your notifications because this is all coming and i don't want you guys to miss it and yeah happy studying [Music]