GAMSAT Questions: How Are They Structured?

All the candidates who are really serious about appearing for GAMSAT must be aware of the importance of reasoning capabilities in them. Almost all the websites that are driven with the cause of helping GAMSAT aspirants will stress on this aspect. The three sections in which a GAMSAT question paper is divided, namely Reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences, Written Communication and Reasoning in Biological and Physical Sciences, comprise of questions that test your skills in reasoning.

The first section, i.e. Reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences section, has been designed to judge how well the candidate is able to comprehend the given passage on the basis of their cultural and social context. The most interesting part about GAMSAT questions is that the passages on which most of the questions are bases come from variety of topics and genres. While on the one hand you can expect a passage for a text on sociology, you should also be prepared to answer questions based on passages from novels and plays. The common strain that runs through the variety of passages is that they try to gauge your logical thinking capabilities and you ability to reason plausibly. You will also come across questions based on poems and cartoons. The difficulty level and the complexity of the thought processing involved in reaching the answers vary. This section comprises of multiple choice questions and you will have to choose the option that is most appropriate.

Section II comprises of the Written Communication section which basically aims at testing the candidates’ creative capabilities and organisational skills. This mode of evaluation has been specially devised so that candidates from non-English speaking background do not find themselves in a disadvantageous position. You will have to write two essays on two different themes in a span of 1 hour. The theme is put forward by a set of five quotations and the candidate has to form a piece of writing which may reflect one quote or more than one quote.

The questions from section III, i.e. Reasoning in Biological and Physical Sciences, are based on basic sciences. Though the questions are reasoning based and are of varying difficulty levels, yet the basic requirement for solving these questions is to have a strong grasp over basic sciences. According to ACER, the body that holds GAMSAT, the bulk of the questions come from Biology and Chemistry (40% each) while questions from Physics form only 20% of the whole paper. To answer the questions from biology and chemistry sections, the candidates must have the knowledge of first year university studies. The questions from this section are designed such that if you have got a good grasp on your basic sciences then you can crack this section with your reasoning and understanding skills.