 What is up guys? Karma Medic here and welcome back to another dose. If you don't know who I am, my name is Nasser. I'm a second year medical student at Kings College London and I make these YouTube videos to try and help you guys with your medical school applications. So today I'm going to be covering section three of the BMAT, the essay writing section. I'm going to go through some general tips for that section and then I'm going to take a look at some essay plans on my computer and talk about how I would answer them live on camera so you guys can see what are the kinds of things that I would be thinking about when solving them. If you guys want to see more videos like this, definitely leave a like on this video, subscribe to my channel and that way you'll be notified when new videos on the BMAT are uploaded. Before we begin, a quick shout out to Medify for sponsoring this video. If you guys want to check out their website or any resources for the BMAT, UK Cal or personal statement, I'll leave links in the description down below. Alright, now without further ado, let's get started on the general tips. So section three of the BMAT is all about communication. It's all about how you can logically rationally and efficiently get your thoughts down on a piece of paper and answer the essay question. I know this is the last section on the exam so you're probably really tired and drained by the time you get to it but you definitely don't want to neglect it. It's still part three. It's still looked at by universities and you still want to do well. Tip number one is don't misinterpret what the question is asking. You want to answer exactly what the question is asking of you because if you go off topic or you start talking about other things, you're going to lose a lot of marks. Tip two is to make sure that you answer every single part of the question. The question is probably going to have two maybe three parts and you want to make sure that you address all of them. The second that you forget one of those parts of the question, you're going to immediately be capped at 50% of the total marks so you definitely don't want to do that. Read the question two or three times to make sure you've answered every single component. The third tip is to not have a one-sided response. You want to make sure that you give both pros and against or for and on the contrary for every part of the question and then you can come to a conclusion and the conclusion that you come to should be the one that is most correct. It's the one that a doctor would do or one that the GMC wants you to do. So that's the conclusion that you should come to but always argue both sides of the argument. My fourth tip I would say is to have a look at as many past paper questions as possible. The reason for this is that if you take a look at all the past papers you'll notice certain themes that tend to come up over and over again. So you want to have a look at all those so that you can answer them really well if something similar comes up on your exam. Tip number five is don't spend too long choosing your essay question. You want to have a look at all the questions you want to skim through them and then just decide what you think works best for you, what you'll be able to answer best and just go for it. If you spend five even ten minutes flip-flopping or trying to decide which question you want to do that's a lot of wasted time that you could spend writing down your points on paper. Tip number five is about essay planning. I know that for me personally I never used essay plans because it would stress me out that I was spending time writing something down that wasn't my actual final essay but I know that a lot of people swear by essay plans and they can't write essays without them. So see what works for you, what type of person you are and if you use essay plans great, if you don't like essay plans that's also totally fine. And my final tip is to always leave enough time to review your essay. Leave something like three to five minutes at the end of the time so that you can have a look over your essay. You are going to find mistakes, you are going to find grammatical errors and there might be something that you want to clarify or make more easy to understand for the reader. Definitely take the time to do this because it's important that your overall language and use of English is correct and it gives a more professional and better read for your essay. I'm also going to include the essay rubric somewhere over here. You guys can have a look at it to compare your essay answers to this rubric. As you can see full marks is for an essay with an excellent answer and no significant weaknesses. You want to make sure you address all the components of the question like I said before. You have to have good arguments for and against the point. Yeah, you should have a compelling conclusion, logical, rational and coherent arguments. Okay, so now let's go and take a look at a couple of actual essays. See what I would plan for them, how I would structure my form, my against, my conclusion and all of that. Okay, so here we are on the medified BMAT online course. The essay plans are located under the tutorials section at the very bottom under section three. So I've actually had a look at quite a few of these essay plans. I've had a read of quite a few of them and I'm going to look at all the questions and answer the ones that I think I would do best that in the actual exam. Since 2016 or 2017, the BMAT has stopped including the vets related questions. So I'm not going to take them into account when reading which question I would choose. So looking at the 2015 past paper, we have these three questions. Computers are useless, they can only give you answers. Okay, so technology is something that I'm really interested in. It's probably something that I could talk about for a long time. So this is definitely one I'll keep on the side. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Okay, I actually find that pretty interesting. But I generally tend to not do the philosophy related questions. And that's just a personal preference. I'm personally not that good at them. So I'm probably not going to do that one. And then when treating an individual patient, a physician must also think of the wider society. That's also really good. I might do that one after. But first I'm going to do computers are useless, they can only give you answers. So this is the full question. Computers are useless, they can only give you answers, quote by Pablo Picasso, explain what is meant by this statement, argue to the contrary, what are the real limits of technology. I'm going to go away for 10 minutes, I'm going to type down a couple of things that I would write for each part of this question. And I'm going to structure it exactly as the question asks it to me, I'm going to explain what this means, or explain what the statement means, argue the contrary, and what are the real limits of technology. All right, so I'll see you guys in a couple of minutes once I've typed out a couple of my thoughts. Okay, so I'm back. First things first, I'm going to define the statement or explain the statement. I'm going to say that computers are electronic components that carry out instructions after a human gives them an input. Now to argue for this statement, I'm going to say that computers have no creativity, computers can think for themselves. The only thing that they can do is carry out instructions once they're told to do so. In fact, they can't even do something that's a little bit different, they can't adapt or change two different scenarios, they just do exactly what they're told. So computers lack creativity entirely. In addition to that, to someone like Pablo Picasso, whose whole definition of creativity revolves around being able to express his emotions and thoughts onto a painting, he's going to find something like computers pretty stupid, because obviously computers aren't able to do that computers simply carry out instructions one after another. And then some other things that have written down are that computers can't work alone, they need a human counterpart. And what a computer could do back then in Pablo Picasso's time is obviously very different to what a computer can do now to Pablo Picasso back then computers might have been deemed useless because they could only do very simple things. So to argue against the statement, I would say that computers back then are not the same as they are now. Computers now, especially with the advancement of things like artificial intelligence, are starting to exhibit things like creativity. Computers can actually come up with images from scratch, they can create voices, they can start to mimic human speech and things of that nature. So computers are definitely becoming much, much more advanced. In fact, nowadays they could probably inspire someone like Pablo Picasso and help Pablo Picasso in achieving their art. Not only are computers not stupid, but they can do things now that humans couldn't dream of doing over many, many years. And the last part of this question is about what are the real limits of technology. And personally, I think that the real limit of technology isn't in the actual humans creativity or the humans innovation, it's in the actual physical components of a computer. For example, the transistors, the resistors, all these things are limited by physics by the speed of light by the amount of electrons that can be transferred, the way they can be transferred, things like that. So I think those are likely to limit technology much, much quicker than humans are. Then I would conclude by saying something like computers aren't stupid, they just weren't very capable back then. And that's why Pablo Picasso may have deemed them useless. But nowadays, of course, computers are extremely beneficial and extremely helpful to wider society. And to someone like Pablo Picasso, if they were around. Okay, I was glancing over these questions. And I really liked this one from 2012. The scientist is not someone who gives the right answers, but one who asks the right questions. So this is the full question. The scientist is not someone who gives the right answers, but one who asks the right questions. Explain what this statement means. Are you to the contrary that the right answers are more important than the right questions? To what extent do you agree that the right questions must be asked before science can progress? So I would start this answer by saying that science can't progress if we don't answer the right questions. We can spend an eternity chasing the wrong questions, looking for an answer in the wrong place. And we'll never progress if we're not originally searching in the right place, or at least moving towards the correct questions. To argue for this statement, I would say that in scientific research, a lot of good research is involved and needed before actually investigating so that you make sure that you're answering the right question. Before you devote a lot of time, energy, people and resources to answering a question, you want to make sure that you're at least moving in the right direction. Why would we even ask a question if it's not going to lead to something useful, which we can apply to humanity and benefit society? To argue against that, I would say that you're never going to find out anything if you don't start asking questions. You don't have to spend an eternity figuring out what the exact correct question is. You just need to start somewhere. You can ask a question and then as you move along, as you discover more things, you can narrow down the question and move further in the right direction. In fact, a lot of discoveries in our past have come by accident. We've been looking into a question that's maybe related or even totally unrelated to what gets discovered. And that's totally fine. That happens through curiosity and looking into something. Any question you ask is only the beginning. As you move forward, as you discover new things, you can narrow down the question and start finding that correct answer. And then to what extent do you agree that the right questions must be asked before science can progress? I would say that I only partially agree. I definitely agree that it's helpful that if you ask the right question from the beginning, you'll probably be more on your way to finding the correct answer. But again, it's only a starting point and we didn't discover everything that we have today because we spent tons of time and research defining the exact correct question. We were just curious and we asked different things. We started exploring and we saw what we came up with and moved on from there. Over time, your question can always be refined. I think the correct answer is to strike a balance by finding the best possible question that you can and moving from there. Okay guys, I think that's where I'm going to call it for today. I hope you guys found useful the general tips that I gave you and also enjoyed when I was talking about the questions and the essay plans. If you enjoyed this video, definitely leave a like, subscribe to my channel and you'll see more videos from me in the future. Best of luck guys in your BMAP preparation. I hope you kill it and let me know how those applications are going. And that's it guys. I'll see you in the next one. Peace.