BMAT Section 2 Maths - 3 tips to boost your score | BMAT Tips Series

Key Takeaways

hello and welcome back to the bat tips series my name is Ali I will be your host for this episode and today we're going to be talking about section 2 maths and I'm going to be giving you some top tips on how to do well in it I am recording this in Hoi Min City Airport uh we've got about an hour left until our flight so I thought I'd do the totally normal thing and bust out the camera and record a video about the bat anyway let's just jump right into it there are three important tips that we're going to be going over today number one is going to be about fractions number two is going to be about time tables and number three is going to be about guessing answer and moving on let's start with Point number one fractions there is a mantra that we teach on all of our bmat crash courses and we've been teaching it for the last 5 years and students have found it enormously helpful and that Mantra is fractions are our friends why do we say this we say this because fractions come up pretty much throughout the whole bmat paper section one problem solving involves fractions section two chemistry involves fractions section two physics and section two math all involve fractions in fact the only thing that doesn't involve fractions is section one critical thinking which is about 17 questions in the whole paper and section three which is the writing task obviously so getting good at fractions is a really good way of boosting your bmat score in fact if there's only one thing you do between now and the bmat improving your skill at fractions is probably going to give you the biggest increase in bmat score what do we mean by fractions well firstly you need to be able to add subtract multiply divide and simplify fractions quite easily and quite quickly and secondly you need to be able to convert percentages and decimals into fractions because numbers are far easier to work with when they're in fraction form than when they're in percentage or decimal form usually in fact what what we recommend for when you you're doing any kind of beat question if you ever see a number in percentage or decimal form just convert it to a fraction straight away because chances are you'll need it in fraction form to be able to work with it later on obviously this is with within reason if you see 0.28 and you have to multiply it by 100 you don't need to convert that into a fraction to do that just you know use a bit of common sense with this fractions are our friends fractions are really important doing well at fractions is going to boost our bmat score secondly let's talk about mental maths getting pro at mental maths is kind of associated with the whole fractions thing but getting Pro Mental Math will also massively boost your bmat score because like I said section one problem solving section two chemistry section two physics and section two maths all involve maths of some sort usually that requires you to do some kind of thing with fractions and being good at mental maths will just speed that up so actionable points please please please know your times tables at least up to 12 Inside Out you shouldn't be having to think when asked you know if a question requires you to work out 7 * 8 or like 9 * 6 or stuff like that unfortunately the people who are the best at mental maths tend to do very well in the bat as well uh because you just save so much time if you can do these calcul quickly of course in the bat you're not allowed a calculator so you have to do everything in your head and there are almost no questions in the bamat that require you to do like long division or like long multiplication or things like that it's all short Snappy sums plus minus times divide that you can just do in your head one way of practicing your mental math is actually a website called speed.com which was coincidentally made by my brother and in that you just take 30 seconds and just do lots of mental math sums as quickly as you can and it gives you leaderboard it's kind of like that brain training Nintendo DS program that uh we used to play back in the day I don't know if you guys still play that thing whether it's still around but when I was in school you'd challenge your Math teachers to a competition of brain training to see who could do the most mental math sums in under 10 seconds or something like that anyway yeah mental math is the way forward getting pro at Mental Math will improve your section two math score but as I said it'll also improve your score in section one problem solving section two chemistry section two physics so that was Point number two point number three please don't be afraid to guess an answer and move on and this applies very much to the maths questions in section two quite a lot of the math section 2 questions are pretty hard and ordinarily you wouldn't be able to do them in under 1 minute there are going to be about seven section 2 maths questions and maybe three or four of them are going to be not doable in one minute if you're a normal person so the trick to doing well in section 2 maths is to recognize these questions quite quickly on and just guess an answer and move on they're not worth your time in fact what we've seen quite a few times through the years is that we get some students who are amazing at math who've got 100% in their gcsc 100% in their as's who've got gold medals in the math olymp ads that sort of thing and yet they still get a low section 2 mock and I think one of the reasons for that is that when it comes to the math questions they get this kind of thing in their head that right this is a math question I know it's only GCSE standard I'm going to get this question right and then they spend 3 minutes on the question and end up leaving five questions in the whole paper blank that's not the way forward please recognize the hard math questions and don't even attempt them if you think you can't do them in under a minute what I did when I was taking the bat and each year when I do the BM section 2 paper under time conditions is that if I see a math question and it requires some kind of shape thing um I just guess an answer and leave it until the end because I know that the bat math shape questions are going to be quite hard I'm not very good at kind of rotating shapes in my head that sort of thing I would just leave it till the end come back to it because ultimately we want to be finishing the paper putting down an answer for all 27 questions at least and then we can always come back to it if we have time in the end which we probably won't because section 2 is quite hard and quite time intensive so yeah if you find that it's taking you over a minute to answer any question in section 2 especially the math questions just guess an answer move on come back to it at the end if youve got time and even better if you can identify in the first 10 seconds that this question is going to take you a long time don't even bother attempting it just guess an answer move on come back to it at the end if you've got time so those were my top three tips for how to do well in section two maths number one fractions are our friends which applies to the rest of the bat as well number two please get good at mental maths which applies to the rest of the bat as well and number three please don't be afraid to leave a question and move on which actually also applies to the whole bat but is especially true of the math questions cuz those are the ones that people for some reason don't seem to want to skip uh not quite sure why let's talk about content now you'll notice that none of the three top tips were anything to do with content really they were more about like mental maths and skills with fractions and [Music] things finally let's talk about practice if you've watched the other videos you know I keep talking on about practice and I keep on saying that the best way to do well in section one and section two is just do lots and lots of practice questions this is kind of true for section 2 maths as well and I say kind of because obviously doing more questions is useful but section 2 maths is is not like section one critical thinking for example where if you do 500 questions you'll probably do very well section 2 math tends not to be that formulaic the questions are usually quite novel every year and it takes a bit of intuition a bit of mathematical reasoning to get the answer so the best way to practice the math questions is doing lots of them uh but also doing them under strict time conditions and even more importantly making sure you know where you went wrong for questions you've got wrong so that you can develop the intuition you can develop the skills and if that question type comes up again then you'll be you'll be able to know what's going on very conveniently there is a website called bmat ninja uh which I plug in every single one of these videos which is amazing for this on bat ninja there are like 2,000 free bmat questions of which a few hundred are math questions that you can just do completely free of charge and if you're serious about the bmat this is pretty much a no-brainer we've got all of the bmat questions from the last like 15 years worth of papers and then some that we've written ourselves that you can do completely free of charge so you might as well and if you do get stuff wrong we've also got work solutions to every single question in the question bank that were written by Oxbridge medical students who tried to kind of explain the reasoning behind it explain how they got the answer in an efficient fashion yes we do charge £29 for access to these work Solutions uh partly because we had to pay thousands of PS to get the Oxbridge medical students to actually write them in the first place but if money is an issue we have a massive bsy scheme that gives out like tens of thousands of pounds to students each year you literally just send us an email and we will give you whatever discount you want of the solutions or of anything on the website so I mean if you can afford it £29 isn't much if you can't get in touch with us we'll work something out so yeah let's conclude this video um and I will go off to catch my flight we've talked about three top tips for the vat those were number one fractions are our friends number two please let's learn our mental maths and times tables and point number three let's not be afraid to guess and move on because the mass questions are quite hard and finally we talked a little bit about practice where I mentioned you should be doing all of the questions on bat ninja you might as well they're all available for free it's pretty much a no-brainer and if you want you can you can pay for access to the solutions or you can just comment over here if you're having difficulty with something and I will get back to you with a work solution as soon as I can so yeah thank you very much for watching this video um if you haven't seen of the videos in the series I recommend you check them out they're pretty reasonable and I give some pretty reasonable advice in the next few videos we'll be talking about Section 3 and then after that we might do a deeper dive into some of the section one and section two topics if you've got any questions about the Bap or about anything at all or if you'd like to suggest some topics that I can cover in one of these videos please let me know in the comments below and I will definitely get back to you not many people comment on these videos at the moment so like I you know genuinely do read everything and will'll take it into account so yeah thank you so much for watching this video I really hope you've gained something from it have a lovely evening and I will see you in the next bye-bye