Approaching GAMSAT problems

Written By James Meroiti

Welcome back to Wednesday Wisdom - your weekly dose of GAMSAT study tips and advice.

GAMSAT problems have so much information, and many people often get lost and confused in all the details. Today I'm going to talk about how I recommend approaching questions to keep our path to the solution efficient and clear.

Please don't read the stem

I get it. You want to understand what you're looking at before approaching the questions. It makes sense in theory, but what actually happens?

  • You read heaps of stuff you don't know the meaning of

  • You confuse yourself trying to relate these ideas

  • You waste a heap of time

  • You freak out about being confused and wasting time

  • You get overwhelmed and can't think clearly or make mistakes

And just to really hammer it home. Be honest with me here. After you've read a stem, done whatever, then gone back to the question... do you know the answer straight away? Or do you go back to the stem anyway?

The fact you are going back to the stem shows you haven't understood it on that first past anyway and it's just made you confused - so what was the point?

What to do instead

Skip the stem and go to the question. 

Read the question and describe the problem. By this I don't mean simply paraphrasing the question. Really describe why you can't solve this. 

Once you have described why you can't solve something, you naturally start thinking of the information or the types of information you need to gather. 

This is the context you need to make your information search efficient.

Example

Let's pretend you have a question that says:

What is the metabolic rate of the fish?
a) 10
b) 100
c) 1000
d) 10 000

Something I see a lot of people do when I ask them to describe the problem is just say, "I need to find the rate of metabolism of the fish". 

That's not the problem. The problem is why you can't just pick one of these numbers. Better ways to describe this problem might be:

  • I do not have information about the metabolic rate of the fish

  • I do not have an equation to calculate the metabolic rate

I hope you agree that when you describe the problem properly, you actually automatically start thinking of the information you need to go back and find. In this case, information (e.g. a graph, table, text) or an equation to calculate metabolic rate.

Now when you go back to the stem you will be focussed on just the information you need and you can spend the necessary time understanding it in sufficient detail to answer the problem. 

Happy studying!

Jim

James Meroiti
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Deductive Reasoning