Situational judgement is the final of the five sections of UCAT. It’s designed to test your capacity to understand real-life situations, find the key critical factors and behave appropriately when dealing with them.
Situational judgement doesn’t assess your academic abilities – instead, it focusses on integrity and adaptability in ethical scenarios.
It’s very different to the other UCAT sections – and it’s marked differently, too.
During the exam, you’ll get 26 minutes to answer 69 questions, related to 22 scenarios. This allows just 70 seconds per scenario and around 23 seconds per question.
It’s the only UCAT section that uses a 1-4 band scoring system, with band 1 being the highest performing band and 4 the lowest.
Situational Judgement is made up of multiple-choice and ranking-style questions.
These can be broken down into the following question types:
The Situational Judgement section assesses your people skills by asking questions centred on ethics, empathy, integrity, team-work and communication. It’s important because, as a doctor, you’ll be working with other medical professionals as well as patients and it’s essential to have good people skills.
The majority of candidates will score in band 1 or 2 when they sit the situational judgement test. Last year, in 2020, only a quarter of people scored in band 3 and just 9% got band 4.
Average Situational Judgement Scores | Band 1 | Band 2 | Band 3 | Band 4 |
---|---|---|---|---|
2015 | 24% | 45% | 22% | 9% |
2016 | 26% | 44% | 22% | 9% |
2017 | 28% | 42% | 21% | 9% |
2018 | 21% | 34% | 32% | 13% |
2019 | 17% | 40% | 33% | 10% |
2020 | 30% | 36% | 24% | 9% |
Find out more about how the UCAT situational judgement is scored.
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