Understanding the Situational Judgement Test in the UCAT: Your Complete Guide

Written By Team MedView
Reviewed By Thomas Nicolson (Currently studying Doctor of Medicine - MD at the University of Queensland)

Situational Judgement Tests are an essential part of succeeding in a professional medical setting, and demonstrate your capacity to make suitable choices based on real-world circumstances.

This guide provides invaluable information about mastering this UCAT assessment with conviction so you can stand out from the crowd for all the right reasons.

We’ll cover the structure and objectives, the importance in medical fields and how best to prepare for the SJT — as well as any potential challenges that may arise during tests, plus tips on analysing results afterwards. With this knowledge, it will be easier than ever before to thrive when taking SJTs!

Key takeaways

• Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) measure a candidate’s professional aptitude and judgement to identify suitability for a role.
• Preparation for SJT success involves understanding the test format, practising sample questions, developing relevant skills such as decision-making and communication, managing time effectively and avoiding personal bias when handling ethical dilemmas.
• Recommended resources include books on SJTs with practice questions, online platforms providing free tests and solutions plus access to practice tests.

Understanding Situational Judgement Tests

Situational Judgement Tests play a pivotal role in the evaluation of various job roles, specifically medical and dental positions.

Situational Judgement Tests measure one’s non-academic capabilities and behaviours by assessing their ability to make decisions based on real world scenarios. By evaluating an applicant’s judgement skills, employers are able to gain understanding about their professional expertise as well as potential for success in that specific field or role. This is why the SJT is used as part of the UCAT.

So what is considered a good score when it comes to SJTs? How should you prepare beforehand? And how exactly does this test work structurally speaking? Let's dive in!

What are Situational Judgement Tests?

Situational tests, also known as SJTs (Situational Judgement Tests), are designed to measure your non-academic abilities and behaviours such as decision making, communication ability and teamwork. Typically, an exam of this nature will provide you with multiple workplace situations along with a range of possible responses or actions for each one.

You then must assess the suitability of every option given by ordering them from most appropriate down to least suitable — showing understanding into what qualities employers value highly, alongside being able to make wise judgements under trying circumstances.

Results gathered from these exams offer invaluable knowledge regarding an individual's skills of professionalism, integrity through compassion and patient-centred care as well as their safety commitment.

Exploring the Situational Judgement Test in the UCAT

The SJT is the final of 5 sections in the UCAT — the exam structure is as follows:

1. Verbal Reasoning
2. Decision Making
3. Quantitive Reasoning
4. Abstract Reasoning
5. Situational Judgement

The UCAT SJT is designed to measure your capacity to understand real world situations and identify critical factors and appropriate behaviour in dealing with them.

The questions in the UCAT SJT don't require medical or procedural knowledge. Instead, it aims to assess core competencies like integrity, perspective taking, team involvement, resilience and adaptability.

UCAT Situational Judgement questions

Within the UCAT, you are presented with a set of hypothetical scenarios that are based in a clinical setting or take place during educational training for a medical career. Some scenarios can have up to 6 questions associated with it and may ask you to rate the importance or the appropriateness of a series of statements in response to each scenario.

You'll be given 4 options but you can only select 1 response. Other Situational Judgement questions might ask you to choose the least and most appropriate action to take in response to the scenario.

UCAT SJT scoring

The Situational Judgement Test includes 69 questions and a 26-minute test time as well as 1-minute worth of instruction reading time. Full marks are awarded for a question if your response matches the correct answer. Partial marks are awarded if your response is close to the correct answer and there is no negative marking for wrong answers.

Each section of the UCAT, including the SJT, is scored on a scale of 300 to 900, although the total cognitive section score is derived from the sum of your individual scaled scores from the first 4 sections, ranging from 1200 to 3600.

Not only is the SJT not included in the final score but many universities don't tend to take SJT scores into consideration within the admissions process, instead preferring to test this skill in the university interview process.

Despite this, the SJT is still a necessary part of the UCAT.

What is considered a good score in the Situational Judgement Test?

While the SJT doesn't form part of your UCAT score and is scored separately, you still want to do your best in this test. In the past, the SJT was separated into 4 quartiles, called bands, with a top 25% score in 2022 around 630-640.

To be in line with the other subtests, you want to be aiming for slightly better than the top 10%. As a result, you want to aim for a score of 670 and above.

Preparing for Situational Judgement Tests: Strategies and tips

To be successful on SJTs, adequate preparation is required. This includes getting to know the structure of the test and training with sample problems so that you can tackle it confidently.

Remember: repeated practice equates to improved results in exams like these — being acquainted with question styles or scenarios beforehand increases your chances of acing them once they arise during testing!

Understanding the test format

Having an understanding of the format and types of questions asked in the SJT is key to properly preparing. Usually, you’ll come across a scenario set within a workplace environment followed by some potential actions or reactions that could be taken — it’s your job to judge how suitable each answer is.

The good news is there are only so many possible scenarios that can exist in the SJT — especially for medical-based scenarios. This means there is a lot of overlap in questions and passages, which allows you to learn how the section if marked.

A common part of the SJT that people struggle with is choosing between 2 answers — usually between A and B or C and D. The best way to differentiate these is to have a good repertoire of questions you have completed in the past, and use critical thinking to determine some similarities between questions to ultimately find an answer.

Practicing with sample questions

As we mentioned above, it's important to have exposure to a number of SJT questions in your UCAT preparation and practice tests and questions are the best way to do this.

Being exposed to varied scenarios and possible solutions allows you to become more efficient at selecting the most suitable responses and grasping the principles that are being assessed.

This is why we created MedView Spark — our learning platform has over 4,500 practice questions as well as practice exams you can work through to become exam-ready.

Alongside practice questions and exams, we create a personalised study plan for you and include progress tracking, which are both developed by current med students. Plus, our interface is designed to mimic the UCAT experience, right down to the keyboard shortcuts and calculator, so there are no surprises and it'll help you feel comfortable for the real deal.

This is sure to help you succeed!

Change your mindset

Another strategy is to change your mindset for questions. Try not to think about yourself but rather think about the person marking those questions.

Think about how a university professor or teacher would think about patient confidentiality, bullying, academic misconduct or alcoholism in the workplace compared to yourself — there may be some differences. And remember to make sure you avoid your own personal biases when answering questions like this.

Common challenges and pitfalls in the Situational Judgement Test

Having an understanding of the potential difficulties and problems associated with SJTs will help equip you for success. Let's look at some of the common pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Missing relevant nuances

One common pitfalls involves students seeing similar questions to those they have previously completed and not identifying any relevant nuances that may separate them.

For example, in a medical question, the role of a senior doctor versus a medical student differ significantly, which may completely change the answer of an otherwise identical scenario.

Similarly, the setting may completely change the outcome of a question. The same question undertaken in a hospital versus a university classroom may also change the answer, as would whether the situation is in someone’s personal versus professional lives.

Time management

Efficiently completing the UCAT SJT requires the practice of good time management. Given you have to answer 69 questions within 26 minutes, this leaves you with just 22 seconds per question.

A common pitfall is spending too long on a single problem, so try to remain strict on how much time you devote to each question.

Dedicating quality time to practice Situational Judgement tests and taking mock exams under timed conditions can help you sharpen your time management skills and become more adept at working quickly. Jump on to the MedView Spark platform and get practising!

Avoiding personal bias

It is vital to remain impartial and not let personal opinions, knowledge or experiences interfere with your answers in the SJT. Instead, focus on picking the most fitting answer that follows agreed-upon standards of professionalism while avoiding an illogical option.

Use the skills you have developed in practising for Verbal Reasoning, which is only retrieving information from the passage in front of you. If you find yourself significantly drawing from personal experience or a similar situation that you have been in, consider what your bias here might be, and use that to formulate an answer.

If you'd like more guidance on preparing for the UCAT, this is what MedView does best. We understand that the process of the UCAT as well as applying to medical schools is not only complex and confusing but it’s more competitive than ever before!

MedView Education takes med school admission to a new level through personalised admission support, application review, entrance exam and interview tutoring, and extracurricular mentoring for students in Australasia.

If you'd like extra support from industry professionals with years of experience, we can help — simply book a free consultation with our MedView advisors to chat about how we can help you.

Handling ethical dilemmas

When faced with ethical dilemmas, responding appropriately is key to succeeding in the SJT. As such, it’s important to think about the values and principles that shape professional behaviour, like patient autonomy and confidentiality.

By taking these into account when answering the questions provided, you can make wise decisions while displaying your capacity to manage ethically demanding situations in a workplace setting.

This involves reflecting on relevant moral concepts before offering an appropriate response regarding the quandaries at hand — no one definitive answer may always be available but determining what’s best should still result from thoughtful reflection and sound judgement all around.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Situational Judgement approach?

Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) involve providing applicants with a work-related scenario which they must identify how to handle and answer in relation to the job for which they are applying. Their level of ability will be tested as the SJT requires knowledge about said role.

In the UCAT, the SJT measures your capacity to understand real world situations and to identify critical factors and appropriate behaviour in dealing with them.

How is the UCAT Situational Judgement Test scored?

Like the 4 previous sections of the UCAT, the SJT is scored on a scale of 300 to 900. But, it's important to note that the total cognitive score is derived from the sum of your individual scaled scores from the first 4 sections, ranging from 1200 to 3600.

This means that the Situational Judgement Test is scored separately.