It seems like there's no more calculators allowed in the GAMSAT anymore! That's quite a change. http://gamsat.acer.edu.au/sit/prohibited-items/
This brings the GAMSAT more in line with the MCAT; MCAT doesn't allow calculators. It also means that what I've said in my blog earlier about figuring out stuff on the calculator for logs can't be done; they either have to give you easy numbers, or they have to give you options in multiple choice which are spaced apart enough so that only one of them is plausible.
(ie, from my previous example, if you can use non-calculator methods to narrow down to a certain range, even though you can't figure out things to a few decimal points without tables or memorizing values. For instance, we can still say that 1/10 of a substance is left somewhere between 3 half lives (1/2^3=1/8) and before 4 half lives (1/2^4=1/16) because 1/8>1/10>1/16 and work from there, without knowing what the decimals are after the 3).
It also means that the whole e^loge type decay
formula which I don't memorize is pretty useless now, without a
calculator or log tables, because the only advantage it used to confer
is not needing to memorize as many log laws (apart from the most fundamental one; a^x=y means logay=x. One of my friends said his tutor called this the "sock rule" because if you draw a bubble looking like a sock around a and x in the log form, the orientation is just like a^x with x as the power, and a as the base. Then y, which is outside of the sock, is on the other side of the = sign). And now you can't be
expected to calculate things accurately in decay anyway, unless it's a "good number" (ie, whole number of half lives).
I think actually they already space the numbers far apart enough in multiple choice for these types of questions so you don't need to figure it out accurately, but I preferred to figure them out exactly anyway for these types of problems sometimes.
I wonder how much the format of questions will change because of this ban on calculators. Maybe there doesn't actually need to be any change, but it will increase constraints on time. In any case, I do think it'd be good for med students to be able to do more basic sums and multiplication without calculators.
Friday, November 4, 2011
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Interesting article, personally I don't think they will change the questions at all. They put a few new questions in every year to test them, but it would take a long time to have enough to change all the calculation type questions, i don't think they'll bother. In my studies I found it hard to know how much pure maths to study to tackle these types of questions. One book Griffiths Gamsat Review from http://www.gamsatreview.com was Ok as it had a section on maths for gamsat & told you how to do basic scientific calculations without a calculator but I would have liked for it to be more comprehensive, and it didn't have anything about log scales.
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