UCAT Situational Judgement

What Is UCAT Situational Judgement?

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.

UCAT Situational Judgement Questions

Situational Judgement is made up of multiple-choice and ranking-style questions.

These can be broken down into the following question types:

• Appropriateness: After each scenario, you’ll be presented with an action. It needs to be rated according to how appropriate it is in the context of the scenario.
• Importance: You’ll get a number of actions after each scenario and you need to rate them on how important they are within the context of the scenario.

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.

Average Situational Judgement Scores

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.

Find out more about how the UCAT situational judgement is scored.

Situational Judgement UCAT Tips

Follow these tips to help boost your situational judgement score:

• It’s Not About Personal Reactions. The questions aren’t meant to test how you would react in these scenarios. You need to ask: what would a medical professional do? How are they expected to act?
• Read Good Medical Practice. The General Medical Council’s Good Medical Practice is fundamental reading for aspiring medics. It will inform you on all aspects of good practice, including communication, maintaining trust, patient safety and teamwork.

Watch these situational judgement tips from one of our Tutors: