Key SJ strategies

Use our top tips for every Situational scenario and question:

1. Read the scenario and find the key issue.
2. Evaluate each response/factor independently.
3. Apply professional and ethical principles.

The scenario in an SJ set is always a single paragraph. The word count can vary, however.

Some scenarios are very brisk, just a couple of sentences. Others can run to four or five sentences – or, less commonly, even longer. Longer scenarios tend to include more characters and multiple key issues.

When you see a new scenario, always begin work with the same tasks:

• First, check the decider question to identify the decider’s name.
• Read the scenario carefully, looking at it from the decider’s perspective.
• As you read, you must identify the key issue, or problem, at its core.
• Watch out for multiple key issues. For example, a patient may urgently need information from a doctor, whilst at the same time there is an issue amongst the clinical team. You need a good grasp of key issues to answer the questions.

Once you’ve identified the key issue in a scenario, you’ll be able to evaluate whether a response addresses the key issue (for Appropriateness) or whether a factor must be considered in deciding how to respond to the key issue (for Importance).

You must not be drawn into comparing responses and factors in a single set.

Multiple responses or factors can have the same answer: there is not necessarily a single ‘ideal’ response, for instance.

Three quite different responses could all be ideal if each addresses the key issue. Three factors could all be very important despite being very different if each must be considered in responding to the scenario.

Take care to use professional and ethical principles as your guide to selecting answers in Situational Judgement.

As you revise, you will encounter the same principles again and again in practice sets in the Medify Practice Bank and mocks.

The principles you must know on Test Day are mostly drawn from the General Medical Council’s Good Medical Practice booklet. Note that you are unlikely to need to know the entirety of this booklet, as some portions are tested uncommonly or not at all. We will guide you to revise the principles that are likely to appear on Test Day.

Remember that the application of ethical and professional principles from Good Medical Practice depends on the context of a particular scenario.

The fact that a particular response is considered ‘ideal’ in one scenario does not mean it will be ‘ideal’ in another. Thus, you cannot memorise specific responses and factors that are ‘always A’ or ‘always D’. In Situational Judgement, context is everything.

As you read each scenario, focus on identifying key issues.

Key issues relate in some way to a professional or ethical principle.

Sometimes, the key issue involves patients, whether it is the patient’s feelings and concerns, or any failures or problems in the standards of care they are receiving.

In regular Appropriateness sets and Appropriateness with Quotes sets:

• Very appropriate responses directly address a key issue.
• They do so in an ideal or optimal way.
• Very inappropriate responses are poor or unhelpful.
• They would have negative consequences for patients or the profession, or make the situation worse with unethical or harmful behaviour.

When evaluating a Situational Judgement response in an Appropriateness set, the first question to ask yourself is:

• Is it generally good? If so, decide if it’s A (a direct and optimal solution to the key issue) or B (fine to do but not a direct and optimal solution to the key issue).
• If it’s generally not good – decide if it’s C (bad but with limited negative consequences) or D (could lead to serious negative outcomes).

Partial marks will help boost your score.

In Most/Least Appropriate sets, there are no partial marks on offer.

You must drag and drop the most appropriate and least appropriate responses respectively from three available options. You get a mark only if both are correct.

These questions appear in a row at the end of the section.

You may be short of time when you get to them, but with practice they can be answered quickly. This is because one of the three choices will usually announce itself quite strongly as good or bad, so it will stand out as either the most or least appropriate.

Don’t worry about full vs partial marks in Situational Judgement.

The scoring system does not affect how you need to approach the section, or any individual set:

• For the questions that have four fixed answers, do your best to choose a side, then narrow to B or C where applicable.
• Simply choosing the correct side should be sufficient to get partial marks on most items that you do not answer correctly.

As the UCAT test-maker is deliberately opaque about how partial marks are awarded, no one knows how the system works.

However, our analysis of UCAT Technical Reports, combined with our own performance data, has informed the development of the Medify scoring system.

In the Situational section, we award 1 mark for the fully correct answer, 0.5 marks for the next best answer, and 0 marks for all other answers.

This applies to all Situational sets except Most/Least Appropriate.
There are no partial marks awarded for Most/Least Appropriate questions. You must drag and drop both the most and the least appropriate response correctly in order to get a mark.