It’s said that NASA spent over a million dollars developing a pen that would work in space. The Russians took a pencil.

The moral of the story about the pen is to keep it simple. The important thing about test preparation is to familiarise yourself with the look of the test, and then to practice. That’s it.

It’s a bit like getting ready for the driving test. If you’ve had some good quality lessons and driven round the test course, you will do better. Also like driving, some people have a natural aptitude for, say, numerical reasoning, and others don’t. In this case extra practice won’t turn you into Einstein, but it will mean that you’re more relaxed, complete more questions, and so are more likely to get a higher score. It’s also worth mentioning that you are not necessarily expected to answer all the questions in a multiple-choice test – so if you don’t get to the end, that’s quite normal.

Some tests include sections that look at how you would behave under different circumstances. For example, there may be scenarios based on ethical dilemmas. With these sorts of ‘behavioural’ assessments the best policy is to be yourself and to use your common sense – trying to second-guess the test designer is unlikely to work!

Dr Test takes each of the admissions tests and provides a brief description, followed by advice on basic and advanced preparation. The basic stuff generally involves using all the practice materials supplied by the test author/publisher, the advanced option where you can find additional tests of the same sort, or what you can do to ‘tune’ your brain to work quicker and better.

Test preparation using suitable practice materials is recognised as ‘best practice’ by tests publishers, and the learned societies that govern the actions of chartered psychologists and human resource specialists.

To find out more about tests used in university selection procedures, click on any of the links on the left of this page.