How Anki helped me score 890 in UCAT QR

If you are applying to medical school, you’ve probably heard of anki being used by med students. For me, it was a big part of my UCAT preparation, especially for QR and AR.

You do have access to a calculator during the test, but you don’t want to be messing around with it unless you have to. In short, you need to train your mental arithmetic and this is where Anki comes in.

It would help to memorise fractions and their decimal conversions. This is what I did, memorising every fraction and its decimal equivalent from 1/1…11//11. You don’t need to memorise it all luckily, there are some patterns.

There is no shortcut to memorising 1/6…n/6, so you are just going to have to rely on plain memorisation. Save it as a flash card to Anki and try practise everyday. The n/6 is extremely important to learn as it is used in time, since an hour is 60 minutes.

As for 1/7…n/7, there is luckily a trick.

Memorise this number: 142857.

1/7 = 0.142857

2/7 = 0.2857

3/7  = 0.42857

4/7 = 0.571428

5/7 = 0.714285

6/7 = 0.857142

You can see how the numbers end up repeating and find your own patterns.

For 1/8, you are just going to have to memorise but remember, it is just half of n/4.

For 1/9…n/9, the numerator is recurring.

For example: 1/9 ‎ = 0.111 , 2/9 ‎ = 0.222 etc.

For 1/11…n/11, multiple the numerator by 0.09.

For example :

1/11‎ = 0.0909 (1 x 0.09)

2/11  = 0.18 (3x0.09)

3/11 = 0.27 (3x0.09)

It is not mandatory to memorise all these fractions and rules to do well, but I can say it did help for me.