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5 November 2020
Two Upper Sixth formers from the King Edward VI schools in Edgbaston, Rhea Takhar (King Edward VI High School for Girls) and Aroun Kalyana from King Edward’s (Boys’) School have made the most of lockdown by taking on a project to help other would-be medics. The pair both aged 18, who have each won university places to read Medicine, Rhea at Oxford and Aroun at Cambridge, have written a new and updated book of worked solutions to past papers from the BioMedical Admissions Test (BMAT) which everyone planning to study Medicine must sit. This is now being sold on Amazon and as an eBook.
“We saw a gap on the market,” explained Rhea “and realised we didn’t have much to do during lockdown with exams being cancelled and no social gatherings, so we decided to write an updated BMAT worked solutions Guide for past papers from 2011-2019.
The BMAT website provides past papers free of charge, but it doesn’t give worked solutions to the answers, so it’s often difficult to work out how to answer a question if you’ve got it wrong during your practice. When we sat the BMAT, both of us used a similar guide to help us through our preparation, so we thought it would be useful for prospective medical students to have a more up-to-date, comprehensive set of solutions, especially for more recent papers. We’ve tried to make the book as user-friendly as possible, walking readers through every single solution. We also created detailed essay plans with our own tips on how to maximise your score, along with links to further reading.”
“Writing the book was really challenging,” added Aroun, “as simply writing over 500 solutions is a gargantuan task in itself. Given the time frame, we’re proud we’ve managed to produce the book, especially given how complicated many of the questions are. It was a really steep learning curve as we had to get to grips with new software and techniques, including preparing a manuscript for publication.”
“Our schools gave us a huge amount of support when we were preparing for our BMAT examinations;” said Rhea, “extension sessions after school with KES’s Head of Biology and the Head of Careers from KEHS). We’re both extremely lucky to have had that kind of support in place when we took our exams.
We hope this will be really useful to any student taking the BMAT, and give them an added level of support, especially during this difficult time. And we’re not finished yet. Aroun and I are currently putting together worked solutions to 8 additional papers, from 2003-2010 – and we’re both thrilled to have fulfilled our long-held dream to study Medicine at university.”
