The Universal Clinical Aptitude Test (UCAT) is an admissions test used by many universities in Australia to select students into health-related careers such as medicine and dentistry. Although the same exam has been used in the UK since 2006, it was first introduced in Australia in 2019 to replace UMAT as Australia’s medicine entry exam.
The UCAT is a 2-hour, computer-based exam which tests for skills and concepts, rather than knowledge and content. It tests various cognitive and non-cognitive abilities which are considered to be desirable in health professionals, such as lateral thinking, logical reasoning, problem solving, decision making, and situational judgement.
The exam is comprised of 4 cognitive subtests and 1 non-cognitive subtest, totaling 233 questions to be completed in a very short time-frame. For most universities, the UCAT is weighed as highly, or even higher, than your total HSC marks – so this exam is a vital step for entering into medicine or dentistry.