Preparing for UPCAT, USTET and the other entrance exams

A different animal from your school tests

A school test covers what your teacher taught in the last few weeks. You know roughly what is coming, you know who wrote it, and if you revise the unit you will do reasonably well. Almost every study habit a Filipino senior high student has was built for that situation.

An entrance exam is a different problem. It samples across years of schooling, it is written by people you have never met, and it is timed tightly enough that pace is part of what is being measured. Revising “the unit” is not available as a strategy, because there is no unit — there is a coverage document and a clock.

There is no unit to revise. There is a coverage document and a clock.

This is good news, in a way. Both of those things are knowable in advance, and knowing them is most of the advantage.

What the papers actually contain

The major Philippine entrance exams publish their structure. The shape is broadly similar across them — language, reading, mathematics, science — though item counts, timing and emphasis differ, and they are revised from cycle to cycle.

Two things follow from this that most applicants act against. First, the science section is where gaps hide, because it spans four subjects taught across several years by different teachers with different emphases. Second, mathematics rewards speed on straightforward items far more than it rewards the ability to solve hard ones — the marks are in finishing, not in brilliance.

The reviewer problem

Nearly everyone reviews from a purchased reviewer, an inherited set of notes, a review centre's handouts, or some combination. These are genuinely useful and they share one dangerous property: they are uneven, and their unevenness is invisible from inside.

A reviewer compiled by someone who found chemistry dull will be thin on chemistry. You will not notice, because you have nothing to compare it against — you will simply work through it, get better at what it contains, and feel increasingly prepared. Every practice score you take from it will agree with you.

This is the general problem described in The topics your reviewer never mentions, and entrance exams are its sharpest case, because the official section structure gives you exactly the outside authority you need to check. Put the bulletin's topic list beside your reviewer's contents page. The topics on one and not the other are your actual study plan.

A review plan that fits around school

You are doing this while still attending classes, which rules out most advice written for full-time reviewees.

1. 1

   Start from the official bulletin, not the reviewer

   Download the current admissions bulletin for each university you are applying to. Write out the sections and what each covers. This takes an evening and reframes everything that follows.
2. 2

   Find your gaps before you start drilling

   Compare that list against every material you have. Mark each topic covered, thin, or missing. Do this first — a gap found in September is a minor errand, and the same gap found in April is a crisis.
3. 3

   Fill the gaps with one source each

   For each missing topic, get one adequate source: a textbook chapter, a Khan Academy unit, a classmate's notes. You are not trying to master it yet, only to stop it being absent.
4. 4

   Test yourself instead of re-reading

   Short, frequent self-testing beats long re-reading sessions by a wide margin — see retrieval practice. Twenty minutes of answering questions from memory is worth more than an hour with the reviewer open.
5. 5

   Add the clock once the coverage is honest

   Only when you are no longer finding missing topics is it worth doing full timed sections. Timed practice on an incomplete syllabus mostly teaches you to be fast at your existing strengths.

Practising the clock, not just the questions

Entrance exams are where knowing the material and passing come apart most visibly, and the cause is almost always pace. A student who can solve every item in ninety seconds fails a section that allows forty-five.

So time your practice from early on, and treat running out of time as a result worth recording rather than an accident. If you consistently finish sixty percent of a section, your problem is not the last forty percent of the content — it is throughput, and the fix is drilling the routine items until they cost you no thought.

The corollary matters too: learn to leave items. An entrance exam is not a test you are meant to finish comfortably, and time spent on the hardest item in a section is time taken from three easy ones later in it.

What not to bother with

A few things absorb a great deal of applicant effort for very little return.

Do not attempt to predict specific questions. Exam-leak posts and “actual questions” threads circulate every cycle; they are overwhelmingly wrong, and revising toward them narrows your coverage at exactly the moment you want it broad.

Do not reorganise your notes as a study activity. Rewriting, colour-coding and summarising feel like work and produce very little recall. If an hour does not involve retrieving something from memory, be suspicious of it.

And do not pick a review strategy based on what suits your “learning style” — the idea does not survive testing, and acting on it can cost you. That argument is set out in full in You are not a visual learner.

Where Mento fits

The comparison in step two is the part Mento is built to do. You upload every material you are reviewing from — the purchased reviewer, your science notes, the handouts, the bulletin itself — flag the bulletin as the syllabus, and it reports which of the exam's topics your materials cover, which are thin, and which are missing entirely, naming the source it found each one in.

Because an entrance exam spans four subject areas and most applicants are revising from five or six separate documents, this is a comparison that is genuinely tedious by hand and quick to automate. It is also the one you most want done in September rather than April.

It will not invent a scope for your exam. Without a bulletin or syllabus to check against it indexes what your materials contain and says so, which is useful but is not a gap analysis — and it says which of the two you are looking at.

UPCAT and the other entrance exams ship as exam programs, which means the section structure is already loaded — you upload your reviewer, not the bulletin.

Check your reviewer against the official coverage.

Section structures, item counts and timing for the Philippine university entrance exams are published by each institution's admissions office and are revised between cycles — the University of the Philippines at upcat.up.edu.ph, and other universities through their own admissions pages. Always work from the bulletin for your own application cycle.

On self-testing versus re-reading, and on learning styles, see Retrieval practice and You are not a visual learner, which carry the underlying citations.