hey everyone welcome back to another video my name is James I'm a first year medical student and tutor of the gam set and today I wanted to make another video kind of extending on the last video I made which was more talking generally about some tips and kind of how I studied for the gam set and in this one I kind of want to extend on that a little bit and kind of show you how you could actually apply those tips to your study so what I'm going to do today is get a practice gam set problem and then look at it and pretend as if I have absolutely no science knowledge which actually isn't that far from the truth and then hopefully that will kind of put into a practical sense all of those tips that I was talking about in that last video and give a little bit more meaning to that and as always if you find this video useful I'd really appreciate it if you could like comment and subscribe okay so what we have here is a practice question that I have made which I have modeled off some organic chemistry questions that I've seen and kind of using uh some of the the common skills that I see in this kind of question so uh it's not you know it's not a proper gam set problem but I think it's okay and I think it should demonstrate the the kind of process that I would go through because remember where're pretending as if I have absolutely no science knowledge whatsoever so I'm going at it as if I don't know anything and this is how I'd kind of go through so whenever I see Gams at problems I always um skip skip the stem and go to the question because in my opinion the question kind of acts as a filter so if you know what you're looking for in the question you will then be able to kind of filter through the stem and find the relevant parts of it because often the majority of it you don't actually need so you're just wasting time and I actually think this is something that they're examining for so it's really good to get into that habit straight away where you're actually thinking about how to solve the problem rather than I see a lot of people kind of look through the stem for information but that tells me that they're not actually thinking about how to solve the problem they're more looking for the answer to hopefully jump out of them which I would say is pretty unlikely to happen so so let's go through that process so we skip through the stem we know it's organic chemistry and then we go to the question and we use this as kind of a filter for what we need to do now we will not if if you're if you're from a non-science background or something like that uh you a lot of this will appear foreign and you won't exactly know what what what you're doing but if you kind of just try as much as you can to work out how you would solve the problem and then that will help identify the kind of knowledge gaps that you need to fill so you can actually execute those skills so for for example in this question it's asking which of the following structures represent the shift base that exists at equilibrium in a solution of propanel and methylamine so you really and and actually probably in retrospect the Gams set wouldn't have these so let's actually just strike these out let's pretend that these aren't here so oops sorry so let's pretend that those those parts aren't there because usually the gam set won't give you all of the the kind of information so you would be thinking right well it's asking me which of these structures represents the shift base so let's go to the question and we'll try to figure out what that stuff means and if you kind of use that as a filter like I'm suggesting you'll probably find this part of the question which talks about shift bases and you can probably hopefully when you read that they're talking about a reaction that forms a shift base for example when two things react with an amino acid so without really knowing what and I guess if I undo that the sentence I'm talking about here is probably this that kind of tells you exactly what you need to know it's saying that we have a reaction it's detailed below and this reaction forms the shift base and that's when a paradoxal phosphate so like you know I don't have the chemistry knowledge I don't actually know what these words mean but I do have the problem solving ability so that should hopefully demonstrate to you that you don't need a high level of chemistry but hopefully just from the parts I've highlighted actually think to yourself if you could come to this conclusion yourself cuz I really think you could without any science knowledge at all from this sentence I've highlighted You can conclude that this thing here is the shift base and these two things here are some kind of paradoxal phosphate B6 or whatever and an amino AET so you don't know what many of these words mean but you know that you need this thing on the right and you need two things on the left to form that and you can kind of see that if you could understand this you would be able to get the shift base and presume you could probably assume then if it's asking for the shift base and it's given you these two molecules as well you can probably assume that somehow these things are the actual things on the left and that is what they are so that's just you know just looking at the words you can actually get a really long way in the question even though you don't have the skills to actually solve it so there was a big thing there you don't have the skills to solve it so how do you develop those skills well now you need to be looking at these molecules and thinking okay how could I actually get an answer like how let's say I knew what this was I knew what that was how would I know what that would form well you need to understand what you're looking at so maybe you're like okay I actually have no idea what any of these letters mean in this molecule and so then you would go to let's say Google and you might type in something like naming and drawing organic organic compounds so there'll be heaps of resources I've actually made a video on um kind of an overview of organic chemistry as well which would cover this but there's heaps of resources out there and you would just you know this is the thing that you would study and once you've studied that you know maybe you'd log it on here as well so naming so this is just a a rough spreadsheet that I've made so naming and drawing um molecules so something like that that's one of your study topics that you need so you would go away you would study that you'd come back to the question and see if that helps you so now you know that this is an alahh and this is the aan group and then you know once you've studied it and then you would be able to work out this is propanel which is prop so that's three carbon so you'd have a three carbon aldah and methylamine so a one carbon amine group and then from that you'd then be thinking okay I've drawn out these compounds what do these RS mean and then you'd go to and you can kind of see what I'm getting at you're going through that process of just gradually adding on the information that you need the specific information that you need to actually solve this problem and I guess why I'm harping on about this so much is I see a lot of people they will see a question like this they'll be like okay organic chemistry here we go and they won't know what to do so they'll go to k Academy let's say and watch eight hours of videos and do all these practice questions but they'll come back and they still won't be able to solve the problem so I think it's really important that from a very early stage you're actually looking at the problem because that problem will tell you what uh science knowledge background content whatever you actually need to uh to understand and hopefully even just by looking at this question you can realize that it's not a massive amount of of knowledge really you just need to be able to draw out the molecules and then recognize that these R groups in the compounds are variable so they will change depending on the molecule but those are the things that comprise the final product so really if you ask me to summarize a chemistry question this is what I would this is what I would think of and that's why I made this question as it is because that's the key skill is drawing the molecules and then Translating that to some kind of reaction so it doesn't to do that you need to know exactly what you're doing rather than doing all this extra chemistry stuff which isn't helping you actually solve the problem so make sure the whole time you're letting the questions kind of guide the the background content that you're studying and just to go back to our spreadsheet you'll see here that I've I've got some here things to practice so I think it's really important that you actually practice these skills in a really isolated and controlled manner so you can get better at them so something that I did was I had just paper flashcards I know that these days you got things like YY and Quizlet and all that but I just used paper flash cards and I wrote on there draw out an alahh a ketone an alcohol whatever and every week or so I would just bring it out and I would just draw that molecule and it would be a lot of the times I'd get it wrong but that built my skill to be able to draw compounds name compounds and and all of that so I think it's really important that you keep a kind of log of the things you need to practice the skills that you have identified from the practice material that will be helpful for the actual exam because ultimately that's what we're trying to do we're trying to build skills and build problem solving techniques that will help us on the actual exam okay so let's press on with the other questions just to keep kind of trying to hammer that home so here we have another question and it's saying which what's the following pairs of compound which of the following pairs of compounds can be used to form this molecule and then hopefully you'll you'll start to see that that's similar it's a similar question but just in Reverse it's now given us this thing on the right and once the question is asking what are the things on the left so hopefully you'll be starting to form this kind of problem solving uh framework for organic chemistry where you think okay I either need to go from the the reactants to the products or I need to go from the products to reactants and how I do that is through naming the compounds drawing the compounds and recognizing what these R groups are and what changes with those various R groups so you'll start to see similarities between questions and that is what's important to help you build that framework so that you can approach any organic chemistry question if we go on to question three you know this is asking we've now got three molecules what's the I mean functional group so we need to evaluate all those molecules so we need to go up here we need to find what that functional group is so that will be detailed somewhere in here and then we need to actually recognize which of these molecules have it so again a very similar skill but slightly different and then just to close off with this last question hopefully my face isn't cutting too much of it off but that's not really too important it's more just about the process there you know if you're looking at this one it's it's got four statements and now you have to evaluate all of those statements so this is a slightly different skill and you might see unfamiliar terms in here so like primary a means so that's kind of an uncommon um structure I suppose it's it's you probably if you revised functional groups you would have seen a means but you probably haven't heard primary secondary tertiary all of that so that's something that you need to go back to your little list um include primary secondary tertiary uh structures of aan alcohols it's also a very common place where I've seen that primary secondary structure thing in there so you've given yourself another study topic go away and study that and then you can come back and evaluate if this statement is correct or not and you can go through the rest of them and evaluate if they're right or not and you start to realize the things that they might be including in there so um you know a lot of these these other things that you might see uh you need to actually go back to the stem and find evidence that supports or doesn't support one of these options so uh one that I included in here was uh I formation includes the N uh nucleophilic attack of an a nitrogen on a chyal carbon so there is there's some I've wrote in here um this statement here make a different color so we can see it so in green here I've got uh the formation of a shift base involves the nucleophilic addition of the aain to the carbonal carbon so if you kind of evaluate that against what this is saying you can see that there's some uh irregularities there so that's another kind of skill that you're recognizing that even though it's organic chemistry you still might need to be kind of evaluating statements and looking for evidence so ultimately it's all just about identifying the skills that are required for each question and then working on those skills and just it it'll it'll take time when you're first starting off it'll take time you'll need to um as I've kind of tried to demonstrate here you might get stuck at at every step you might not know what the C is or what these lines are in a molecule or something like that but that's what you're studying and you're building that skill and you're building it in a targeted way and I promise you it'll be far more efficient doing it this way than going and doing some kind of online organic chemistry course and coming back because it won't help you I can I've done it and I can promise you it won't help all right so I hope that was helpful I I really think that studying in this way is really effective if you're using the questions you're recognizing what information is actually relevant for you to solving the problem you're not going on some kind of endless Rabbit Hole of studying scientific theory you're actually seeing exactly the information that you need to understand and simultaneously you're also seeing how the problems are structured and the kind of problem solving techniques that you need to actually get through the question and get to the answer or get to that area where you need to actually execute those skills so I think it's really really good to start with the questions early and when you are practicing those skills make sure you're doing it a lot and you're doing it in a really controlled way so it's kind of a two-pronged approach where you're working on your problem solving skills but you're also working on these kind of science skills or math skills or whatever in a really controlled fashion so when you get there you'll be able to execute them really well so I hope that was helpful if you have any feedback on this I'd love to hear it and I'd love to hear any other kind of videos that you'd like me to do um and if you like this video please uh like And subscribe and I'll see you in the next one