UCAT Decision Making Partially Correct Answers (how does scoring work)

Advice & Insight From UCAT Specialists

For the Decision Making section of the UCAT, there are two different question formats to answer. The first type involves multiple choice answers where you have to select one response out of four. For these questions, the answer is either right or wrong. You get 1 mark for a correct answer; no partial marks are available for this question type. Typically, there are about 20 of these questions although this can vary from year to year (out of 29 questions in total).

The second type of question, commonly referred to as “drag-and-drop” questions, are worth 2 marks each and partial marks are available if you do not answer them fully correctly.

Let us focus therefore on the types of question where partial marks are available.

“Drag-and-drop” questions

In the Decision Making section, you should expect about 9 “drag-and-drop” questions which are worth 2 marks each for fully correct answers. This type of question requires you to respond to five statements about the scenario by placing a “yes” or “no” answer next to each statement (by dragging and dropping the relevant answer in the correct place). In order to achieve 2 marks, you need to correctly select “yes” or “no” for each of the five statements by using your deductive reasoning skills.

What if I don’t get all five statements correct?

For this question type (usually a syllogism), you can score partial marks for correctly matching four out of the five statements correctly. So if you manage to judge four out of five statements correct, then you will receive 1 mark. Unfortunately, only getting three out of the five statements correct does not give you any marks for that question. It is therefore crucial that for these questions, you remember to drag-and-drop a response for all five statements; if you leave one out then you can only score a maximum of 1 mark for that question. And if you only put an answer for three of the five statements, you won’t get any marks.