The short answer
How to convert months of preparation into your best performance — across both of the days you actually sit.
Written and checked by GAMSAT tutors — not AI-generated.
Try the reasoning style
We treat forgetting as a failure — a lapse to be patched with reminders and records. Yet a mind that kept everything could not think; it would drown in the undifferentiated noise of every moment it had ever lived. To forget is not so much to lose information as to decide, mostly without our noticing, what was never worth keeping.
The author's argument relies most directly on which unstated assumption?
Pick an option to see how the tutor reasons to the answer — not just whether you were right.
Not quite — the answer is B.
Work backwards from the conclusion: a mind that ‘kept everything’ supposedly ‘could not think.’ That only follows if thinking means leaving most of experience out — so B is the premise the argument quietly rests on. A raises reliability, which the passage never weighs; C contradicts ‘mostly without our noticing’; D smuggles in a claim about intellect the passage never makes. The question rewards finding the hidden premise, not recalling a fact.
By exam day the learning is done. Your only job now is to not get in your own way — to let the preparation you've already built show up under pressure. And the first thing to get right is that there is no single exam day. You sit twice, weeks apart, and the two days have almost nothing in common logistically. Check your own key dates for the exact days in your cycle.
Your two sittings
Section II — remote, online proctored
- Two essay tasks on one shared 65-minute clock
- Sat remotely, from your own room, under online proctoring
- The logistics are your device, your room and the ID check
- A day of its own — the other sections are not attached to it
Sections I & III — in person at a test centre
- 62 questions in 100 minutes, then 75 in 150 minutes
- At a test centre, on a multi-day window
- The logistics are the route, the arrival time and what you may bring
- The only day of the whole exam with a between-sections break
Don't cram the night before
Late cramming trades a good night's sleep for a few low-value facts. A rested brain reasons faster and panics less — and Section III is a reasoning test. Sleep is preparation. That holds for both sittings.
The week before each sitting
Taper, do not cram
Light review and confidence-building beat frantic new learning. The last week adds very little to what you know, and it can take a great deal from how well you use it.
Run one full simulation
At least once, sit it full length and under time — and at the same time of day as the real thing, so the fatigue arrives where it is going to arrive on the day rather than surprising you.
Remove every logistical unknown
Your two sittings have different logistics, so plan them separately. Section II is sat remotely under online proctoring: test the device, the room and the ID check well before the day. Sections I and III are sat in person at a test centre: know the route, the arrival time, and exactly what you are allowed to bring.
Run each day on rails
The night before
Stop studying early and wind down. Before the in-person day that also means packing ID, admission ticket and supplies, and knowing your route and arrival time; before Section II it means the device, the room and the connection are already tested and ready.
Before a multiple-choice section
One slow breath, recall your plan (two-pass triage), then start. Read the first stem before the stimulus. Section II has no stems and nothing to triage — there the equivalent is deciding how you'll divide the 65 minutes before you write a word.
Between Sections I and III
On the in-person day, the break between Sections I and III is the only handover you get. Mentally close Section I — you can't change it — and reset for a section that counts double.
When panic spikes
Pause for one breath, do the next easy question to rebuild momentum, and come back to the hard one later.
Trust the process
You will not know every answer — nobody does, and you don't need to. Bank the marks you can, reason through the rest, guess the impossible, and keep moving.
Check yourself
On the in-person test day you finish Section I feeling it went badly, with Section III still ahead. What's the best move?
Key takeaways
- Sleep beats cramming — a rested brain reasons better.
- It's two sittings, weeks apart: Section II remote and proctored; Sections I & III in person at a centre.
- Plan each sitting's logistics separately — a proctored room check and a test-centre route need different preparation.
- The break between Sections I and III is the only handover you get; reset there.
- You don't need every answer — bank, reason, guess, move on.
Practise this with real GAMSAT-style questions
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