[update] GAMSAT is complete!

Just finished the GAMSAT today. I felt section 1 and 2 went better than last time (having a stronger feeling about section 2), but did not feel as confident about section 3 coming out of the exam. So right now it feels like maybe section 1 and 2 might have increased but section 3 decreased from last year. Of course, scaling is going to come into that too, so it's hard to go with my own feeling without knowing how hard this exam really was compared to last year. I can categorically rule out the possibility of improving my scaled section 3 mark from last year though, which is a bit of a shame.

I still guessed quite a big amount for section 1, but compared with last year I thought maybe it was a bit less. Whether that leads to a better score is another question, depending on how much of the guessed questions I got right and how hard this year's exam was compared to last year in section 1 among other things. For section 2, the writing topics were about affirmative action (task A), and money and happiness (task B). So for task A, I wrote a bit about how biomed's cutoff for 2011 was 98.45 for most applicants but 88 for low socioeconomic status and rural applicants as an antithesis but also how it's important to break the poverty cycle and how university degrees have an average return of about 12% a year according to a study by unimelb (thanks to the macroeconomics lecture). For task B, I wrote about how in East Germany happiness levels increased steadily as incomes increased since they had low income, but how such a pattern was not visible in the USA (of course I wrote much more than that for both and had more points, but I guess that's some of the stuff I used). So if I did well in section 2, it'd be a lot due to the luck of doing introductory macroeconomics. I have a feeling that I strayed away from the general theme for part B a bit though.

Anyway, I hope that after scaling I have a better score than last year. Regardless, my old score was pretty good anyway and there shouldn't be too much of a problem getting an interview at Melbourne. Just got to wait another 8 weeks to find out my GAMSAT score... and somehow not get too distracted from studying in the meantime. In the short term, there's about one week of lecture content to catch up on!

In the long term though, here's the layout (with "key" events): GAMSAT results are out in about eight weeks, then a few weeks later are the semester 1 exams. After a four week midyear break after exams, there's going to be eight weeks of semester 2 then the midsemester break. And during this midsemester break, the second week will contain the medical school interviews!
Now that much is almost certain given I can still use last year's GAMSAT results if this year didn't turn out so well. However, if all goes to plan, then I might get a provisional unbonded place at unimelb. Then the semester 2 exams... and if they're done well enough, then I'll be in. Well, that's the plan anyway. There's still quite a while to go yet.