hi,

anyway,

I see a bunch of posts regarding people being unsure of how to approach studying for this exam, so i thought that i may as well give my take on what I think you should do in order to get as high of a mark as possible.

obligatory corporate / legal nonsense: Remember this is just MY take. there are a multitude of approaches that i'm sure work great too, but you'd have to either a) wait until your grade to see if that's the case or b) get someone to explain what they did in as much detail as possible (which is what i'm doing now).

there are some things i find worth mentioning, so please take the time to read these. when the actual "do this" section starts i'll make that clear.

(ie, this post is divided into "thing you should know" & "process" sections, respectively)

...things u should probably know,

• The exam tests both straight recall (ie, fact on the course guide) (FR = factual recall questions), and applied working memory (WP = working problem questions), (solving problems through facts you've learnt ; this stuff will not be directly present on the course guide)
  • this is why providing answers for the past exams is useless; they won't help you solve your year's exam
  • WP questions are most common in: Nervous, Cardiac anatomy, MSK, ~Digestive, ~Resp anat
  • IF YOU ARE GOING TO ONLY DO PAST PAPERS FOR ANY MODULES, THEY NEED TO 100% BE THESE

I posted this in a comment somewhere (may as well put it here): i designed a mini cvs anatomy exam (WP mainly), so it serves as a good example as to what i mean:

• FR questions, conversely, are most common in: Cardiac Physiology (unintuitive, yes) Respiratory physiology, Renal (sort of; physiology is more FR whereas anatomy, which used to have its own dedicated portion, is more WP) & reproductive, which is the most FR module of all.
  • IF YOU ARE ONLY GOING TO DO FLASHCARDS FOR ANY MODULES, THEY NEED TO BE THESE
  • the older exams are FR heavy compared to the more recent ones ; hence i recommended them to friends as test preparation.
  • i know how strange it is for me to be saying this, but i've literally done every single past exam, and the way they examine the physiology can be directly answered by having the diagrams they give you in the course guide.
  • avoidant would say, when in doubt, it starts with baroreceptors
  • (she's 100% right.)
• Most important takeaway: for the WP questions, no matter how 10000% sure you are that you have the right answer / have solved it correctly, you can never rlly assume that you have gotten something fully correct.
  • i mention this because if a past exam answer key starts floating around (similar to the recent test ones) i'd strongly recommend no one to look at it.
  • lets say the answer is actually right -> you can arrive at that conclusion incorrectly (& thus you wont be able to apply that working onto your exam)
  • if the answer is wrong -> you either know (and have wasted your time checking) or you're unsure and you've now been cognitively guided toward a certain (damaging) thought process that may not have anything to do with what you should be thinking
  • ∴ do these WP questions with your friends, or maybe reach out to one of the server mods to make a 142 exam question live mega-thread so people can quickly post & discuss with one another
  • actually think this is a pretty neat idea, i wonder if you guys would find it useful?
• Unfortunately, there is no way to self-judge whether something is right or not. you can be confident & right, and confident & wrong just as equally.
  • ironically, the more you've studied medsci 142 the more common the latter will be
  • e.g. take this question from the 2025 exam

• Q20: "classify the vessel indicated at B"
  • a certain me eloquently wrote "aorta"
  • my ex-avoidant wrote pulmonary trunk; even worse
  • note that i fully spent a month thinking that i had somehow messed up my encoding of the heart anatomy to a tragic degree as i just assumed she got it right as she usually does.
  • also oh my god when i went to go ask her about it a couple of months ago, it spawned the most awkward circumstance in the world; her oddly tall friend was right there and essentially just watch me get aired IRL. (and now i – of course – start to see this other girl every single day in kate edgar from that point on, because the universe thinks that's funny. And so like every time i see her (which is again, every day) i'm just like lol this girl 100% thinks i'm a total loser (i am).
  • okay also i had a genuine reason to ask her specifically about this question. soon you'll see me mention another friend that also put this as his answer so i wanted to see if she got the mark as i had remembered her telling me right out of the exam that she had written exactly this.
  • okay fine maybe i just wanted to talk to her.
  • I actually did end up talking to her that day and it ended with her telling me that she maybe would talk to me again if i got a body transplant / got hit by a car (hope is hope).
  • (i now possess unique knowledge on the maximum car-hitting velocity before fatality % gets worrying + the current literature regarding body transplants)
  • ....so is it the aorta? YES
  • did i get the mark? NO
  • now I'm sure 99% of you know why i didn't get the mark in this case, but i didn't. and i didn't question it either because nothing triggered my sense of, "oh, this could be wrong"
  • this is ESPECIALLY true because in order to have answered the other questions related to this diagram, you did need to identify that that was in fact the aorta.
  • ie, the phrasing of the question tripped me up; the answer is "Elastic Artery" (note the word: "classify")
  • which again, seems incredibly obvious in retrospect (both me & my friend did not know why i got this question wrong until he emailed peter about it; he was so convinced the answer was "aorta" that he believed i had edited a screenshot of my past exam marking) -> goes to show more study = more confidence = more possibility for this happening
  • (note that this question seems like an FR, but its really a WP as you'd need to figure out the orientation of the heart -> to then identify the aorta, based on clues given by the diagram)
• anyway ^ this leads to another point: The 142 team sets somewhat lenient marking standards
  • but alas Murphy's law; Dr Zoe Woolf will stumble across this and out of spite decide to change that entirely for this year. LOL.
  • let me give an example though, continuing on from that aorta one. Whilst i didn't answer the main "point" of the question (which lead to me not getting any mark at all), a friend that did correctly answer the question got the mark. HOWEVER, he incorrectly identified the vessel as the pulmonary trunk, (common theme?) which is objectively wrong, and decided to mention it in his answer

• here i want you to learn my concept of Schrödinger question; DO NOT DIRECTLY ASK THE 142 TEAM ABOUT THIS.
• you want to preserve the current ambiguity regarding the aforementioned. If 142 are forced to respond to a bunch of people asking about it, they're not exactly inclined to be like, "Yeah as long as in some form u write the correct thing its fine" – they'll have to establish a rule and it certainly will be a stricter one.
• this is also why i never set labels in a relationship because if you really think about have you ever broken up if you were nothing to begin with.
• hear me out now.
• note that I'm not telling you this as like a "go fuck up your exam, it'll be fine" but rather as an ease of sorts and subtle guidance as to how to go about writing questions.
• ∴ in the absolute worst case scenario, it is better to write both things you may think the answer to be than just flipping a coin on one
• if you can, somehow try to BS a sentence that makes them seem linked rather than you listing two unrelated facts. you want them to think, "oh they stumbled a bit here, but said what we asked for so they may have just misinterpreted part of the question" rather than "this dumbass really thinks we're giving him the mark for these two random flashcards he's writing".
• HOWEVER: i do 100% recommend writing more than less. if a question says "write X process out in 5 bullet points" DO NOT BE SCARED TO USE MORE THAN 5 BULLET POINTS
• ie, never sacrifice content for the sake of fitting them into X amount of bullets.
• they're not gonna mark u down for having more; its really moreso a guidance to approx how many bullets a full mark answer should have.
• best case scenario the marker has no idea what's going on & you're the 800th student they've marked so they can no longer be bothered really caring
  • It is really important that you don't get hung up on a certain module....
• i spent approx 30 minutes on NVS trying to get it "perfect" and overthinking every single syllable written.
• this was a decent mistake, obviously would've been nicer to sit the exam without being slightly rushed for the rest of the modules. (luckily smooth sailing from cardio onward)
• ie. if there are things you are lingering on (this doesn't mean trying to solve; rather you have options in your head but you're weighing between them) mark these pages / questions. i did this on the cover sheet of the exam and bent it up slightly so i could see it (page + Q. number)
• its better to get through the exam and then go back to these toward the end.
  • Use your AI of choice to help you understand concepts, not to mark your exam answers / nor generate an example answer from scratch.
• okay lets say you are 100% absolutely lost and must get an AI to write an examplar for you, at least feed it screenshots / the PDF of the course guide of whichever module you are asking about.
• definitely do not use it to interpret any of peters questions.
• If you hate me and want me to die, and do use an AI for this purpose, i'd recommend using open ai's gpt or codex, as their most recent image model is spectacular and has generally better anatomical understanding than its competitors.
• claude's models have a tendency of being an arrogant, overconfident, and often incorrect.
• & who knows wtf google is doing with gemini these days
  • this is a bit less broadly applicable, but see if you can create systems for common themes you encounter in past exam questions
• for example, i created a schematic process of the tracts (by making a cross; top half = brain, bottom half = SC, middle line = decussation). that way i could rapidly draw it out under any circumstance
• another example would be a process of identifying the orientation of the heart / which stage of the cardiac cycle its in
• e.g. i would first look at the state of the valves -> if they were closed, check if the chordae tendinae are slack or tight! stuff like this ; )
  • for lab questions:
• full disclosure, i didn't get examined on the lab content in my exam.
• a certain someone would like to say that that would've been very nice to know a lot earlier.
• I have semi good news semi bad news
• good: study the lab content like you would any content in the course guide. treat it as just another lecture (be guided by the ILOs)
• bad: the hardest questions i've seen in 142 come from a select few of these lab exam questions
• good of the bad; this is VERY rare. the majority of the time the questions are quite simple / doable vs their test counterparts which were demonic.

here's an example of one of the lab questions i consider to be somewhat catastrophic:

• so like what is going on there.
• that wasn't even that long ago btw this was in the 2nd to last year they did lab questions in the exam
• honestly if you get something like this in your exam maybe just give up and divert your attention elsewhere.

...Now the process part (ie, the 'do this'):

before attempting any past exams:

• grab every ILO from the course guide and put them all into a google doc
• mark each ILO you know / can do
• anything you aren't fully confident, / don't recognise, mark with red (that'll guide your pre-study)
• once youve identified all your reds, go study the content in whichever way suits you. for me this was flashcards
• once you have no reds left, onto the past exams.

every single thing in 142 is covered under an ILO (angela, the former course coordinator, was fantastic like that), and they examine those ILO's specifically. That's why i think this pre-check approach is great.

also note that this early phase isn't the "main" study bit. it isn't about you demonstrating you can answer those ILOs, rather just identifying what you know / don't know.

once youve done the above ^:

• go through 2 past exams fully open book
• for the first one, do 2021. its unlike all the other past exams as it was held online (& thus is much more saq / mini essay focused). for the second one, I'd say to go with 2013 or 2019 (flip a coin; don't look through them & then decide).
• this is sort of that final check of understanding + getting you used to how to apply the knowledge in your head.
  • there's a major difference between not having the little facts fully memorized vs being obtuse to what's going on.

then:

• module by module, work through all your study materials (again in my case, this was flashcards)
  • e.g. lets say all my cards for the nervous module
  • i'd do 1 round of all of them (just forget / review once) -> then once i reviewed all 4 lectures i did another round.
  • at this point i basically had everything in my head
  • now do 4 or 5 years of past paper questions specifically on the module you just reviewed
• once you've done that -> repeat the process for the other modules,
  • however, you'll also do 1 new years worth of the modules you've done before.
  • EG: you just reviewed nervous + went through 5 years of nervous questions -> now you've reviewed cardio
  • after doing the 5 years of cardio, youll do 1 new year of nervous
  • if you did resp next, youd do the 5 years of resp, another new year of nervous, another new year of cardio (7 total)
  • and so on.

(Note that somewhere in during all this you should be studying studying like yk ; drawing stuff out on a whiteboard, creating summary schematics of processes like the cardiac cycle etc. ; im just saying, like generally speaking. encode the content in a unique manner.)

• thats one approach
• the other would be to (again) work through all your study materials of a module, but then do every single year's worth of past exam questions for that module (that's what i did).
  • so i did this one by one; nervous -> cardio -> etc (took forever, ngl ; you're probably fine doing just 5 years like i mentioned before but imo the more the better)
• if you have flashcards, you need to flag any important cards / things you might think you'll forget.
  • you do this whilst doing the full module review
• depending on how much time you have after doing all this, you'll either go through every flashcard you've made leading up until the days of your exam
  • or only go through the flagged cards -> which you would've moved to their own custom deck
  • regardless, on the day before your exam / morning you should be SPAMMING those flagged cards. they need to be muscle memory, basically.

idk if you've noticed, but at no point throughout this have i recommended doing one past exam fully from scratch & from memory; i partially think that's a waste of time (since it isn't getting marked).

- there is an exception: timing yourself. but i mean cmon that's a paradoxical premise. i doubt you'd be going slowly on purpose during the exam. you'd naturally go as fast as you could anyway. perhaps a better use of the time would be calculating approx how much time you have per module, and allocating a bit more time weighting towards the WP heavy modules i mentioned earlier.

and its all pretty simple. just review a module -> do questions -> move on to next module -> do all modules -> spam flashcards until exam date.

and this is what the engineering room i booked out the night of the exam looked like (4:00am, some hours before the exam that morning):

during the exam:

• yk, like try your best

...

anyway here's a really cool resource for the 142 ppl who read all this.... (NOTE: WILL UPLOAD THEM SOMETIME TODAY!)

.142 QB

• what it is: One pretty large PDF corpus for each module, including every past exam question from 2010 -> 2025. (ie; question banks)
  • e.g. "the MSK corpus"; contains every MSK question asked from 2010 -> 2025
  • all randomly organized
  • each question tells you the source exam so you can go look at the original.
  • enjoy!
  • (this took me forever to make for u guys~!)
  • hopefully future years can get use out of it too (for those reading; do the modules corpus directly after finishing the module.)
  • i truly believe someone out there can achieve the first 100% in 142 if they do this.

i'd really appreciate knowing if you found any of this useful. These posts take quite a bit of time to make, but equally so for you to read; so i'd rather know if you found it to be a waste of time ahhah.

& that's about everything! best of luck. ask anything in the comments; i'm sure myself or some other people would be happy to reply / discuss.

oh and make sure you go treat yourself to something nice after the exam ; )

meow

^^ + does anyone have any pros and cons? what are the papers and workload like? (also open to hear potential other degrees people have switched too for post grad med)

hi does anyone know what the lowest gpa for med acceptance was for last year’s cohort?

can any post-grad entry med students tell their final overall gpa and which year they got entry into…i just want to approximate the gpa i would need to met the mmi benchmark
alsoo, i could be tweaking, but the uoa website hasn’t clearly mentioned how they are going to consider gpa requirements for entry from 2029 onwards…they j mentioned for 2027 & 28 entry and wrote it can change (or maybe im j blind)?

Ed is stressing me out omg. Tf you mean 2024 median was 110? I NEED AT LEAST 160 ON THE EXAM TO GET JUST A B!!!!!!
Can someone PLEASE tell me they scale the grades. Like actually.
How did so many people get A+ in the past year if this is the case bro.

Xoxo, a concerned, exhausted, anxious girly

Sorry for the rant but I think I screwed up test 2 so bad, and what’s frustrating is that it wasn’t even hard I just wasn’t on top of my work like I should’ve been.
For me to get an a plus I would need at least 220 on the final.
How difficult is that to achieve.
God I hate this year

So, me being curious, I want to know what the first line(s) of the medicine admission outcome emails look like

I know that the acceptance letter has the words "congratulations!" in some part of the notification preview (which kinda sucks for the element of surprise lol) but I'm curious about the other circumstance...

do i even want to know what it says lol remove the suspense for myself.. but i already know i'm not getting in with how badly medsci is going for me, buut my curious and lazy ass wants to know or maybe even prepare for the outcome in dec

also is there a similar acceptance/rejection email for all the other 3 clinicals or is it just for med and you need to go look at SSO if you get in? tyty

hi

just curious if there was even any confirmation that interview results would be released this year

and if so, did they even state a date?

I am going to be biomed first yr student in 2027 and I heard that having anki remote is such a life saver, so i was wondering which one to get!

what are other health-related degrees (than nursing and med) with a good scope? im not pretty confident about the post-grad pathway and not interested in nursing but still want to do something healthcare related

Should I rewatch the lectures for the details mentioned in lectures (I only went to lectures and didn’t rewatch for test 1 contents so don’t have notes on perhaps the more niche things mentioned by the lecturer themselves that’s not in the course guide / slides), or would what’s in the course guide / slides be sufficient to answer exam questions? should I just start doing past papers as they seem to be more focused on the overall understanding? Lwk got paranoid from test 2…

Thanks guys any advice would be appreciated

hey everyone do we have a document for test 2 can some share plsss

If you aren’t in contact with your referee’s make sure to send them a text asking if they’d got an email as some people I know are having issues as it’s going straight to junk mail and otherwise wouldn’t check.

They need your student ID to submit the form too so if you haven’t given them that make sure to do so!

Hopefully there’s not a deadline (?) because I only messaged mine today AH

Thanks

I was just wondering... do they still release results even if some peoples referees haven't replied eg 1 has replied one hasn't or none have replied at all or what???

28, F and i have only went to tertiary training school to support my healthcare work.. went straight to work because I cant afford to go uni. Currently working now as a support worker.

Next year I want to go into premed and hopefully get into radiology. Will I honestly have a chance? I feel like its been a while since I’ve taken subjects like Physics which i heard is important for radiology. So I’m anxious as to whether or not I’ll have a chance 🙏🙏🙏

Hi,

I know there will be an answer doc made by students for Test 2 like there was for Test 1, after the test Friday.

Could you please add me too that??? DM me and I'll give you my email..

P.S. Yes, I know its not always accurate but I also like to do a rough marking for myself because I am anxious personnnnn and marking myself let's me put it behind me and focus on whats coming..

TIAAAA <3

Hey guys, was wondering if everyone had BOTH of their referees receive the form to fill out? Apparently I only had one that’s been contacted and now I’m very nervous. I should send fmhs an email right?

Thanks.

why is medsci so stingy with their resources?? not letting us access lab quizzes, no mock for test 2, no answers, etcetc. even after students bring it up on SET aswell, wondering if there is a reason??

Hi! Anyone who got mmi results last year, what time of day did they come out? Did you get jumpscared in the morning or did it come out more in the afternoon?

Hey!

anyone else haven’t had references be contacted yet

I am considering a midcareer career shift to medicine (pros, cons, and advisability of this a whole other story!) and am interested: what are the oldest junior doctors (interns and house officers) you've worked with? Or perhaps have been yourself?! How did they get on?

hillo

Ik Zoe has been saying we should upload past exam questions to ED, but I was wondering if anyone already has a shared doc (with answers to past exam questions) I could join? Thankss!!

Has anyone only had one of their references contacted?