I'm trying to prepare for my UKCAT on August 17th. Most of the sections I find okay but the Abstract Reasoning section just makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.

*panics*

I seriously have no idea how you do these questions ... it's things like "does shape A belong to set B or set C" etc ... and you have to find common things in these random shapes.

I understand where the answers come from once I see them, but given fresh questions I'm back to square one again of being absolutely clueless.

Does anyone have any tips, or know of any good practice books or anything?

EDIT: The decision analysis section was okay ... but does anyone know where I can find similar example questions? *needs more practice* ...

CPPF

The best thing to do is probably going over the questions on their web page and try to see where the answers tend to come from. Maybe you could practice making lists of all the possible connections and work out how to discount the wrong answer(s) as quickly as possible which should make it easier compiling mental lists on the day. You might find similar questions on internet IQ tests a lot of them use sets of shapes etc.

I never sat the UKCAT but i seem to remember the people in our school were told to put D if they weren't sure about the answer as its the one that comes up most often, i think that was the decision analysis section though.

Don't worry about it too much though people always seem to do better than they expect to on it.

Try thinking SPANSS -
S for shape
P for Position
A for angle
N for number
S for shading
S for size.

Look at all the given info and see if there is anything to do with the shape that is the same, then the position, then the angle etc.

Not sure if a) that makes sense or b) it's any help.

Hope you get the hang of it!