BMAT Section 3 Essay - Everything you need to know | BMAT Tips series

hey guys welcome back to the bee map tip series my name is Ali and in this video we're going to be talking about section three everyone gets worried about section three because it's it's billed as it's writing tasks it's s saying that you have to write but I I personally thought the section three was probably the easiest part of the beam out and in this video I'm just going to be explaining the tips and tactics on how to do well in section three and how to prepare for it firstly I'm going to talk about space and scoring the two S's and then we're going to go on to talk about some tactics that you can use to prepare for section three and on the day of the exam to maximize your score in Section three firstly let's talk about space you really don't have much space to write on and this is what the answer sheet looks like as you'll see it's pretty much an a4 page but the top quarter of it is taken up with your name and candidate number so really all you have to write on are three quarters of the side of a4 that's not even a full side of a4 because they've got that border around the edges which you're not allowed to write outside of so what we always recommend is that instead of thinking of section 3 as as like an essay instead think of it as just writing 3 paragraphs because really you only have room to write three or four paragraphs in that small box that they give you and I think thinking about it as writing a few paragraphs makes it much more psychologically manageable than thinking about it as an essay because essays are scary as we all know secondly let's talk about scoring section three is marked I see you get a number out of five like one two three four or five or like a point five in the middle of that and you get a grade so a B C D or E the number is basically the content of your essay and then you have a letter the letter is the grammatical spelling punctuation that kind of stuff most people get an A for grammar some people get a B a very small minority get a C and if you want a D or an e you really have to try hard to actively screw things up because it really is quite hard to get a D or an e for grammar your essay is marked by two examiners and these examiner's tend to be graduate students at Cambridge each year we get the email from the admissions Testing Service saying would you like to mark Bheema essays and you get paid like I don't know 18 pounds an hour for it you essays mocked by two of these examiners and the mark that they give you is averaged out but if there's any significant discrepancy in marks between two examiners like one gives you a 5a and one gives you Toodee then the senior examiner marks it and that kind of adds some element of safety to this otherwise fairly subjective task of marking a be my essay so what's a good score three is pretty pretty reasonable four and five are pretty good most people get an A or a B for the grammar thing so I mean from what I understand most universities use a cut-off of maybe about two point five C so as long as you get a 3 C or above then you're pretty fine and actually to get a 3 all you really have to do is answer the question provided you've answered the question chances are you will get at least a three and then if you use like nice language and explain your points nicely that's what gets you into the fours and the fives so we've talked about space you don't have much of it and we've talked about scoring let's now talk about tactics on how to prepare for section 3 in section 3 you get half an hour and you have to write one of four possible essay titles one of those titles is usually like a medic II kind of question like you might be should we offer a treatment to obese people under the NHS or it might be something about euthanasia or something about abortion the second one is usually some kind of vet question so I can't remember I think I cat euthanasia or like Cruelty to Animals you know that that kind of thing the third way is usually some kind of current affairs topic so in my year I think it was about freedom and liberties and I think one year that was of something about education policies you stuff like that and the fourth one is usually some kind of quote by Nietzsche or Aristotle or Socrates or someone famous and you have to interpret the quote and kind of answer the sub questions associated with it I'll put a few examples of questions up on the screen but as you can see you've got a main question or a main statement and then you have three or four sometimes two that will solve questions provided you answer all of the sub questions you will almost certainly get at least a three out of five if you fail to address any other sub questions the highest mark they can give you is a two so the one sure way of completely destroying your section three paper is by not answering one of the questions so please don't do that please make sure that you answer every single aspect of the question that you've chosen okay so how do you choose the question this is also an interesting topic we always recommend that you spend at least two or three minutes actively deciding which question to do it's very easy in the heat of the exam you know it's you've just done section two section two is super super time-pressured you've really sad after section two and you think oh crap I didn't have any time in section two therefore I need to rush into section three please don't do this section three is not very time-pressured at all you've got half an hour and in fact it only takes about 10-15 minutes to write in that box more on that later so it's really important that you choose your question wisely what I would recommend is that actively go through each of the essay titles and just kind of think in your head write what points do I have to address each of these sub sub points and then obviously pick the one that you have the most things to save for in terms of choosing a question there is no benefit to choosing a weird question over a normal question so I mean some some people that I've spoken to over the past few years seem to think that oh if I choose the weird quote by Aristotle then the examiners will look at me more favorably because everyone's gonna be answering the question about medical ethics but no one's gonna be on Tsering that question completely ignore that type of thinking just pick the question that you think you can answer best the examiners don't care which one you answer and it's much better for you if you answer the easier question and get the marks on it then if you try and tackle a more difficult question just because it seems more difficult so at this point we're about two minutes into our section three paper we've got 28 minutes to go and we've decided what question we're going to do the next step of section three is to really plan our essay very well and what I was doing it I spent about 15 minutes planning my essay planning is by far the most important part of section three what you want to do is you want to plan the essay to the point where you know exactly what you're going to write when you finally put pen to paper and it's and you're not like making stuff up as you go along the reason for this is that you only really have one shot at that section three answer sheet I'm not sure if the rules have changed in recent times but previously they were only ever allowed to give you one sheet and if you screwed up that a sheet then that was the end of it so what we always say is treat this answer sheet as if it's sacred don't touch it at all until you've already planned your essay in advance and you know exactly what you're going to write so in terms of the planning stage we recommend splitting up into two parts number one is the brain dump phase and number two is the organization phase so the brain dump phase is where you like I mean let's say the essay title is these people shouldn't be treated under the NHS because it's a self-reflective condition something like that the subsections might be explained the reason for being a reason against and to give your own thoughts so we can split up our paper nicely into three sections we've got four we've got against and we've got the conclusion so in the brain dump phase I would just be writing as many points as I could possibly think of for the four for the against and kind of work out what conclusion I want to go from here and while writing these points down I might expand on some of them so I might say oh we've got limited resources in the NHS and if I remember the budget of the NHS might say the budget of the NHS is around 110 billion but this isn't enough because I don't know cancer drugs are not being funded and ease of being closed down that sort of thing so the point I would be making is that we have limited resources but then I'd be kind of expanding on it with maybe one or two extra bits of bits of information and that would turn it from like maybe a three essay into a four essay for example so this is our brain dump we just write as many points as we can and then in our organisation phase which took it should take a few minutes we pretty much pick one or two points from each section that we're gonna go with we physically don't have the space to write any more than that and an essay like we shouldn't treat obese people under the NHS it's a really really long essay and I'm sure you'd love to write loads and loads about it but you only have these three or four paragraphs so you've got to pick your best points and think about how they're gonna flow together so for this essay for example I might be like okay my introduction is gonna be this after the introduction I'm gonna say one reason in favor of not treating obese people is that obesity is often regarded as a self inflicted condition given the limited resources of the NHS it seems unfair to use funds for the treatment of a self inflicted condition when those funds could instead be used to fund cancer treatment or to fund two genetic pediatric cases things like that and then when arguing against this I might say that others would argue that obese people have an equal right to treatment under the NHS as anyone else does because they pay taxes and because the NHS was founded on the principle of free health care at the point of need if I had space I might do one more of each and then I've conclude by saying in conclusion I believe that dot dot and I would have this kind of in my head and ideally on paper during my organisation phase of the planning so at this point we still haven't put pen to paper we still haven't written anything on our answer sheets we're just kind of actively very very detailed planning our essay because we've got loads of time so that's the planning phase of section three now comes the writing phase and in the writing phase you've got to put pen to paper and write in really small really neat handwriting on this on Paige the smaller you write pretty much the better it is because you can put more points in and that can give you get you more marks if you're right very untidily that's bad because the examiners might not want to read it and might not be able to read it and you just want to really make an effort to try writing as neatly as possible if you're the type of person whose handwriting is atrocious and give yourself a bit more time for the writing spend a bit a little bit less time with the planning because that neaten you can make your handwriting the better it'll be for you one thing I always recommend for people preparing for section 3 is that you should practice one two or three timed essays in advance like obviously before the exam and you should print off that on sub-grid that's on the be mapped on the official be met website I'll put a link down below and when you print that off you'll be able to see exactly how much space you've got to write in so when you do these time to essays you write it on that piece of paper and you time how long it takes you personally to write really small really neat and to fill that gap fill that space so when I was doing it I timed it took me about 1213 minutes to write really small really neat in that space so that means I could have 15 minutes of planning 2 minutes for choosing the question and maybe some time left over at the end for checking if I was a bit quick on the writing front so yeah what you guys should do when preparing for section 3 do a couple of time two essays time how long it takes you to write in that box and use that time to work out how much time you've got available for planning for checking in for choosing a question and in the exam by the time you get to the writing stage you've pretty much already planned out your essay you know exactly what you're going to write so you're not gonna have any problems hopefully with writing the essay finally at the end it's very useful to check through the essay make sure you've got everything sorted make sure you haven't accidentally put a knot in your conclusion which would completely change the meaning of your essay however we do want to be avoiding doing the whole crossing and asterixis and that arrows and that kind of thing you also can't write please turn over and write on the back because it's only the front of the sheet that gets scanned and it's just not very nice for examiner's to have to kind of interpret scrolling x' and asterisks and stuff so if you can avoid it them that would be ideal but of course if you're in danger of not answering the question like if you've got to the end of the essay and you like oh crap I haven't written my conclusion and that was one of the things that was being asked then yes of course you need to do whatever it takes to get that conclusion in there because if you don't have a conclusion and the question asked you to write a conclusion then gonna get 2 out of 5 and we wouldn't want that so yeah in your checking phase just make sure everything is everything is in order and above all make sure you've answered the question because that's the most important thing and actually if you only take away one thing from this video it's that please answer the question if it has three sub sections that you have to address please address those three sub sections if you do that and write reasonably reasonable English then you will get at least three out of five and that will get you over the cutoff point for any University so at this point if you still with us we've talked about space which you don't have much all we talked about scoring I've explained how the scoring system work and I've kind of given a walkthrough of how I would approach a section three paper from picking a question to doing the brain dump to doing the organization phase where I decide what I'm gonna write to actually writing it and then checking at the end just to make sure everything is fine now let's talk about things that you should do to prepare for section three I've had a few emails over the last few weeks of people asking what books you'd recommend for section three whether you should read a short introduction to medical ethics whether you should keep up to date with BBC health and Guardian and stuff to get some more points for section three and what I would say to all that is that it really doesn't matter what you read for section three obviously when you're applying to medicine it's useful to be you know vaguely up-to-date with what's going on in the health care industry you know Bri reading Guardian or BBC health anything like that Nina New Scientist is quite good I quite like the student BMJ but I don't think there's much to be gained from actively reading stuff in preparation for section three because to be honest by the time section three comes around and by the time most people start preparing for the B Matt they've only really got a month or two until until the exam and there is only so much your essay writing skills can improve in a month or two I've marked quite a lot of B Matt essays over the last five years just from teaching the courses and people sending them in to us and what makes a good essay is not that they've introduced some rogue point that they got from a treatise about medical ethics it's just that they've stated the basic points a bit more nicely than other people have so honestly I don't think there's that much to be gained from actively reading about medical ethics and things in preparation for section three but of course I mean if you're interested you should be doing anyway and in preparation for interviews it's always good to have more knowledge in your bank how else can you prepare for section three people sometimes ask how many essays should I be doing should I be practicing one time two essay each day all that kind of stuff and I would say that's probably a bit overkill in terms of actual timed essays you only really need to do two or three to get an idea of what your things alike and then the rest of them if you really feel like you'd struggle with section three then I would recommend just going through the past papers and just planning the essays out that's what we do here at Cambridge when we have essays to write most of us don't bother writing out the whole essay when revising for exams we just kind of think about it and plan the essay out because we know that if that came up in the exam we'd be able to write it if that makes sense so planning is for quicker than actually writing is writing just gets really boring and really annoying so do a few essays actually timed and writing it down just so you have an idea of what the timings are like but don't worry too much about doing reams and reams of timed essays because I don't think that's gonna be particularly helpful instead if you just plan the essays you'll get all the benefit from it so yeah I think that everything I have to say about section three honestly in my opinion it's the easiest part of the be Matt but it's the part that a lot of people worry about because they're worried that they haven't done an essay subject to a level or anything like that you don't need to have done an essay subject at a level to write three or four paragraphs about about any kind of topic really you just need to answer the question try and put your points across clearly if you do that you'll get at least three out of five and then anything above that is just kind of showing off with nice language and good sentence structure and that kind of thing so thank you very much for watching just to recap again we've talked about space we talked about scoring and we've talked about how to approach the essay one section at a time so the planning the organization the writing phase I've given you some thoughts on how I would prepare for section three if I were taking the be Matt this year ie I would just write a few times essays to get the timing right and then I would just maybe practice a few essay plans but even that might be a bit overkill so yeah I think that's everything I have to say about section three I think we'll do another video either today or tomorrow talking about how to come up with points how in-depth your examples need to be whether you're allowed to make facts up that kind of thing so we'll do another video on that but in the meantime if you have any questions let me know in the comments below and I'll do my best to answer them thank you very much for watching if you haven't seen the rest of the videos in the B map tip series I suggest you do I'll also put a link to a video I did with my French adara it's like a 20 minute long conversation between the two of us where we talk about how we prepare for the B map and just kind of give you some more tips for it so I'll put a link to that down below thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next one bye