GAMSAT – DISCOVERING GOOD DOCTORS

GAMSAT is an international medical test primarily designed to assess problem solving and critical thinking ability of the aspirants. Now, pertaining to the above statement, one can always raise questions doubting the logical line on which the above idea has been based. One can always question—How is mental ability related to medical studies?…What help does critical analysis provide to students of science?…Now to prove the worth of the above statement we can go into a brief description of how such mental tests really assist the students of medical field.

Today, the study of medicine can lead one to an immensely successful career. Not just this no matter what profession you tend to adopt, it all contributes to making a better human race. The qualifying techniques of judging the best out of a lot has gained prominence. Now, the aspirants of medical entrance exams like Graduate Australian Medical School Admissions Test (GAMSAT) and Undergraduate Medical and Health Sciences Admissions Test (UMAT) are required to prove their mental and logical abilities. This doesn’t imply deviating the aspirants from their basic subject knowledge. Today, one can clearly view how nearly half the medical entrance questions are framed on judging the logical and mental abilities of the aspirants. The U.K graduate entry level program into medicine is supporting methods or rather to say has created trends to bring forth the worthiness of the candidates.

GAMSAT for instance has 75 questions set in the reasoning and logical interpretation section of the paper. Among many reasons, it is argued that it is now not sufficient that the aspirants or better to say our future doctors merely excels with knowledge and technical competence. It is advisable to have a strong social skills and awareness. We expect our doctors to listen to the patients carefully and also communicate comfortably at all levels. Adding to the expectations we want our doctors to be caring, empathic and diligent. We personally want them to be flexible and cope up with changes as required. The need to select students with cognitive abilities and personal attributes to become ‘good doctors’, has led the Australian entrance test authorities into in co-operating such reasoning ability tests. Such practices are convenient method of judging the behavioural and also reflect attitudinal abilities of the aspirants. The main aim of GAMSAT and UMAT in inheriting such section is just to form a socially diversified body of aspirants who would take the clinical skills to an essential level of humanistic qualities like good communication, good teamwork and also sustaining to the ethical values.

The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) which evaluated from the MOSS Test very well explains the adoption of logical and reasoning sections. In 1920, the US school dropouts raised from 5%-50%. This gave rise to the preparation of a test that would evaluate the readiness of a medical student. This phase saw the development of test with topics related to visual memory, logical reasoning, science related definitions and lots more. In 1940, MCAT underwent a few changes and included quantitative abilities and understanding modern societies as their subtests. The phase of 1970 renamed understanding modern societies as general information. Today after reviewing all its sections the MCAT has four sections including Physical Sciences, Verbal Reasoning, Writing Samples and Biological Sciences. This implied that mere theotrical knowledge would be short-lived and what helps is to know the practical abilities of the aspirants in dealing with the tough situations they may have to face occasionally.

Likewise, the effectiveness of GAMSAT assessment helps in delivering a lot of most skilled doctors to the renowned medical schools. In this reference one can see how intakes of medical students have tremendously increased in U.S. A student with non-scientific background is nowhere at disadvantage. Rather judging the aspirants on the logical and mental ability aspects helps the entrance institutions in providing a set of most efficient doctors. Rather, GASMAT collects all praise for inducting the most desirable candidates by analyzing their mental abilities that helps the scientific field in the long run.