How to Prep for UMAT (No Prep Courses!) - Tips, Techniques and Recommended Materials

Someone last year told me section 2 is all vocab-- actually this piece of advice is always given-- and it's true!! If you don't know what despondent, apathy, desolate or whatever mean it will be hard to rule them out or pick them as the correct option.

This might help: http://www.sba.pdx.edu/faculty/mblak...elingsList.pdf

^ I think that list is mainly just a guide to learn all the emotional vocab. I didn't find it particularly helpful though. If you think you have a good grasp of vocab it really depends on your literature analytical skills imo. And after taking it twice, I think it's best to not worry about that section at all. First time I took it I didn't finish S1 and it made me nervous so I kind of rushed through S2. Second time, I chilled out about it and did it more like a guessing the emotion game. Worked out well

Disclaimer: May or may not work out well for you.

Originally Posted by Asher

^ I think that list is mainly just a guide to learn all the emotional vocab. I didn't find it particularly helpful though. If you think you have a good grasp of vocab it really depends on your literature analytical skills imo.

Definitely agree with Asher, compiling a list of all the words you encounter in your prep (Ambivalence *shudders*) will only help you so far. Having also taken the umat a few times and trying different section 2 approaches e.g reading different genres of emotive novels and trying to deconstruct feelings etc, I found the most effective method for improving section 2 was forming a group of people with different intellectual backgrounds, and sitting down and all taking the same section 2 practice test then afterwards all try to propose an explanation why we all chose the particular answer and comparing it to the actual answer. In forming the groups we would have people from arts, science and engineering degrees, and occasionally students in highschool. Pro's of this approach is that it opens you up to new perspectives in approaching the question and allows you to understand how you can be analyzing the question wrong. Con's is that going through the material can be painfully slow cause there's alot of group discussion involved, you will also need alot of section 2 prep material, also if your entire group thinks the same way as you do then you're in trouble, but I highly doubt that will occur
Again, this may or may not work for you.

Just a point I thought I should put out there (dunno if it's been said before, even if it has its worth reinforcing ), keep doing practice, and even if you're good at a particular section, keep doing it anyway, because you encounter different types of questions in every practice paper which need different thought processes, and you just get faster every time.
The vocab is a good idea, but you should also look at the answers of every question you answer, so that you see how you should be thinking for each type of question.
And of course, time pressure is good. Always practise under time pressure. That definitely helped me.

I found that the more you do practicing Section 3, the better result will be.

Originally Posted by Br0nzy1s

Having also taken the umat a few times and trying different section 2 approaches e.g reading different genres of emotive novels and trying to deconstruct feelings etc, I found the most effective method for improving section 2 was forming a group of people with different intellectual backgrounds

I found the most effective method for section 2 was to guess...it worked to some extent.

Originally Posted by philistine

I found the most effective method for section 2 was to guess...it worked to some extent.

Heh, you used my method. 'Hrmm, I haven't used 'C' in a while...' Was how I did half of section two.