Introducing GAMSAT Section I

Reasoning in Humantieis and Social Scienes is generally referred to as Section I of the GAMSAT.

Section I tests reasoning skills that are useful for university study and future careers in medicine. The questions are multiple choice, with four answer choices per question.

One answer is correct; the remaining three are incorrect.

Each question is worth one mark. There are no partial marks, and there is no negative marking for incorrect answers.

This means that you should always select an answer, even if you’re unsure.

Section I is intended to test your reasoning in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Passages cover a wide range of topics from many fields in these disciplines.

The split between Humanities and Social Sciences varies from exam to exam. Sometimes the split is fairly even, sometimes weighted more heavily towards one or the other.

There is no formal curriculum for Section I. The section does not directly relate to coursework or exams you have taken previously, although you are expected to have a good grasp of logical reasoning skills.

The marks in Section I come from the questions, not the passages. However, you will spend a fair amount of time working with the passages in order to answer the questions.

By ‘passage’ we mean any text or image that accompanies the questions but is not part of the question itself.

Most Section I questions come in sets that share a passage. You will likely see a small number of standalone questions – each with its own passage – as well.

Text passages account for 76% of all sets in the official GAMSAT practice materials.

In most cases, a single text passage will accompany multiple questions, so you will need to study the same passage several times as you work through the set.

Some sets include multiple text passages, which could be presented in two ways:

• The passages appear in separate tabs in the online testing interface; some questions may use only the first tab, while others will use the second tab or both tabs.

• All the passages appear in a single tab but are clearly marked as distinct passages, for example, one tab with several poems or two passages on related topics.

You may also encounter standalone questions with a text passage. This simply means that the passage accompanies a single question rather than a set of questions.

In the official practice materials, these texts are extremely short, often just a single proverb or quotation.

You may not encounter every passage type on Test Day.

However, preparing for each passage type develops transferable skills you can apply across Section I.

For example, practising Opinion sets builds your ability to consider multiple viewpoints. This is a core skill tested throughout Section I.

You may be stronger in one area than the other. If you have very little experience interpreting poems or fiction, it could be more challenging to find the subtext in a Poetry or Fiction passage than to answer the most difficult questions with a Data passage.

Use your awareness of your relative strengths and weaknesses to modify your technique in Section I:

• If you tend to struggle more with Poetry and Fiction passages, you may need to skim or study these passages before answering the questions.

• If you are much stronger in Non-fiction passages, you may find it works well to skip the passage and go straight to the questions.

Your key task in Section I is to find the part of the passage that justifies the correct answer for each question. The correct answer will normally match the information in the passage.

Wrong answers may seem superficially similar to the passage, but they will typically either contradict some aspect of the passage or distort its meaning.

Remember that the marks come from the questions, not the passages. Your challenge is to understand the passage adequately to answer each question. This is not necessarily the same as reading comprehension.

In exams with reading comprehension sections, you must read each passage in great detail to ensure a deep understanding of its structure and logic. Some Section I questions may seem to require this, but the vast majority will deal with narrower parts of the passage. In many cases, the answer will come from part of a sentence, or from parts of two nearby sentences.

Your work in Section I will be less interpretation than matching: find the answer that fits with the information in the passage.

Sometimes, it will be quicker to eliminate answers that are clearly not supported. Take care not to breeze past the correct answer as you do so. This skill will take some practice.

In most Section I questions, you will need to read (or re-read) part of the passage in order to find the answer that matches or is supported.

If a question stem includes a quote from the passage, you will usually need to read a little before and a little after the quote – the correct answer will often come from an adjacent part of the passage.

Practise studying the relevant details as you come to each new question in a set. You are unlikely to recall enough specific details from just reading the passage through quickly once before you look at the questions.

Each Section I question has four answers: one correct answer and three incorrect answers.

You can get to the correct answer by doing the straightforward work of matching the passage.

Sometimes a question might be harder, or you might be running short on time. In these cases, you can also get to the correct answer by eliminating all the incorrect answers.

The same types of wrong answers appear again and again in Section I. With practice, you will start to spot these wrong answers more quickly and eliminate them efficiently and confidently.