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About The GAMSAT

The GAMSAT is a standardized multiple-choice test to assist Graduate Medical Schools in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and Duke-NUS in Singapore to select students for medical programmes.

It draws upon a wide ranging skill set and subject knowledge, and places great emphasis on reasoning ability and critical thinking.

Even if your first degree is in a non-scientific field of study, you can still sit GAMSAT and succeed in an application for admission to one of the graduate-entry programs.

However, although the exam focuses on your reasoning skills, do note that prior knowledge of biology and chemistry at the first-year undergraduate level, and physics at A-level is expected.

At 5.5 hours long, the GAMSAT is shorter than the MCAT, but certainly still incredibly long for a standardised test.  Unlike the MCAT which is offered several times a year, GAMSAT is usually offered twice a year, in March and September. You’ll get your GAMSAT score via email, once the testing period is over. For the September sitting, you can expect results from late November. For the March sitting, results are usually sent at the start of July. There’s no limit to the number of times that you can sit GAMSAT, and the scores are valid for a period of 2 years.

Questions on the GAMSAT are based on material drawn from a variety of sources. They typically require you to read and think about a passage of writing, interpret graphical displays of information, use mathematical relationships and apply reasoning skills to tables of data.

Here’s what you need to know about the GAMSAT test format:

About The GAMSAT

GAMSAT Format

GAMSAT is delivered as a digital test in 2022.

GAMSAT is branched into 3 separate timed sections:

  1. Reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences
  2. Written Communication
  3. Reasoning in Biological and Physical Sciences.

For each section, a reading time of 5-10 minutes is allocated.

Number of QuestionsReading TimeWriting TimeTotal Test Time
Section 1
Reasoning in Humanities & Social Sciences
628 minutes92 minutes100 minutes
Section 2
Written Communication
25 minutes60 minutes65 minutes
Section 3
Reasoning in Biological & Physical Sciences
758 minutes142 minutes150 minutes

Reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences

This section tests students how well they can comprehend ideas in a humanities context. Various texts such as passages of personal, imaginative expository and argumentative writing, cartoons and poetry are used as stimuli. Questions contained within Section 1 are variable in their content, length, and difficulty. You have 100 minutes to answer 75 multiple choice questions.


Written Communication

This section tests students on their capability to produce and develop ideas in writing within two 30 minutes writing tasks. The theme for each task will be general in nature. The first task will be based on socio-cultural issues and requires application of argumentative writing, and the second is based on more personal issues and requires the utilisation of more creative, or reflective writing.

Written Communication is assessed on two criteria:

  • The quality of thinking of the theme
  • The control of language; grammatical structure and expression.

Reasoning in Biological and Physical Sciences

This section tests students from 3 discipline areas; Chemistry (40%), Biology (40%) and Physics (20%). The questions form these three areas are integrated throughout the section and in multiple choice format. Students will be given stimulus in formats such as text, mathematical, graphs, tables and diagrams.

Students will be tested on reasoning and problem solving ability within a scientific context, recall and understanding of basic science concepts. Students should be able to identify knowledge in new context, analyse and interpret data, discover relationships, translate knowledge and apply hypotheses, make generalisations, deduce consequences from models. There are 110 multiple choice questions to be completed in 170 minutes.

Related: MCAT vs GAMSAT

1-to-1 Trial Lesson

Prep Zone Academy offers a personalised 1-to-1 GAMSAT preparation course. Fill in the following form if you’d like to register for a trial lesson.

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