GAMSAT exam week: the final checklist

One sitting is already behind you. The Written Communication essays were sat remotely on 22-23 August — whatever happened in that room is done, and nothing you do this week changes its mark. What remains is one day at a test centre, 11-13 September: Section I and Section III, the two reasoning papers.

The final week has exactly one job: deliver the score your preparation has already built. That means protecting marks, not chasing new ones — and this week, those are different activities.

What to keep practising — and what to stop

Keep the things that maintain sharpness: short timed sets at exam pacing, because the skill most perishable this week is the clock, not the content. Keep re-doing the questions you got wrong recently — the fix is fresh and cheap. Keep ten minutes a day on the handful of facts you keep dropping.

Stop opening new topics. A concept met for the first time this week will not be exam-ready by the weekend, and every unfamiliar thing you touch now spends confidence you'll want on the day. Stop marathon sessions too: fatigue accumulated on Wednesday is still there on Saturday.

One full mock left — early in the week, never the eve

If you have a full-length rehearsal left in you, spend it early in the week. Its value is pacing and stamina under real length, and it needs a day either side to be worth anything — a mock sat the night before costs sleep and teaches nothing. When you review it, audit the clock as much as the answers: for each miss, was it knowledge, reasoning, or time? Our Section III timing post covers the banking and walk-away discipline in full.

Settle the logistics early — against the official source

Three things, settled by midweek rather than discovered on Friday: photo ID that matches the name on your ACER registration; your test-centre address and how long the trip really takes at that hour; and your reporting time, from ACER's admission details. Details like what you may bring into the room and what will be at your desk are exactly the kind of thing forums get wrong — confirm them against ACER's own instructions for your booking, and treat everything else (this post included) as a prompt to check, never as the answer.

The timing strategy, one more time

Section I gives you 62 questions in 100 minutes — roughly 96 seconds each, with the passage doing most of the work if you let it. Section III gives you 75 in 150 minutes with no calculator — a 2-minute average that hides wildly uneven questions, in the section that counts double in your overall. The discipline is the same in both: first pass takes everything that yields; anything that resists gets a best guess, a flag, and your banked minutes later.

The night before

Close loops, then stop. Lay out your ID and admission details, plan the trip with margin, and write your method card from memory — your per-section pacing rules and your two personal watch-outs, nothing longer. No mock, no new questions after dinner, no cramming: the marginal fact memorised at 11pm costs more in sleep than it earns in marks.

The morning of

Eat something you'd normally eat, leave earlier than you need to, and expect nerves — they are arousal, not evidence about your preparation. Once seated, the plan is the one you rehearsed: read the stem first, take what yields, and when a question ambushes you (one will), remember it is worth one mark — the same as the easiest question on the paper. Give it its two minutes and move.

The essay sitting is already banked. The preparation is already banked. This week you just deliver it.