The admission procedure is divided into a written ranking test, a job-specific aptitude test, and a personal interview with the admissions committee. We’ve spoken to Anton (name changed) several times over the past few weeks as he went through the various steps of the application process to gather tips on how to prepare for you.
We can already say in advance that Anton achieved one of the best results in the ranking test with 121 points: 148 were achievable, 128 points were achieved by the best test participant this year.
“How did you prepare for the ranking test?”
After missing the application deadline last year, Anton wanted to play it safe this time. During our first phone call, he told me that in addition to a preparatory course with Daniela Traxler, he had also prepared a book by Hesse / Schrader. The course alone was very helpful because Anton didn’t “have to find everything himself” and the test content in the course was “conveyed really well and compactly”. The hand-out with other exercises was also good for learning.
During the preparation, Anton concentrated particularly on the “Quantitative Problem Solving” section:
For the mathematical tasks, it was pleasant to go through them again in the course, because in high school you quickly stop multiplying and dividing by hand. Repeating the basic arithmetic and mathematical basics such as calculating percentages and interest in general also gave me new self-confidence.
With the “Perspectives” part, Anton didn’t have any major problems during the preparation, but in general “very good tips for every point were given in the course in the event that you don’t know what to do next – and how you can then go through things step by step. “During the preparation, he personally always went through all the tasks as he saw fit and then applied the solutions that he had learned in the course. “Even with the rows of figures it is often the case that you see it straight away,” says Anton, taking into account tips such as “that you look at what belongs together and whether there is a pattern.” If there are dots and lines in the exercises, then he first looked at “what the dots do and then what the lines do, because that’s how it is usually structured in the exercises.”
“How did you prepare for the interview?”
In preparation for the admission interview with the examination committee, the hand-out from the preparatory course from MedicMind Australia helped him, in which, for example, a distinction was made between opening questions and questions that should throw applicants off the mark. As an example, Anton mentions a gap in the resume that the psychologist on the commission often addressed. Or if you need longer than the standard period of study for a previous degree.
In principle, it is important to be prepared for questions that have absolutely no relevance in terms of content: “With many of these questions, you may not even imagine being asked,” Anton tells me During the first year of the physiotherapy admission procedure, she was asked why she wanted to work primarily with older people in physiotherapy after her previous studies as a primary school teacher.
If you have already thought about questions that are not relevant in terms of content, you can think it through and then give a natural but well-thought-out answer. But the most important thing is not to pretend, because the Commission will notice when you are totally tense and do not seem natural.
During our conversations, it is noticeable again and again how much Anton has asked around his friends in order to collect as much information as possible: “In any case, I know exactly what to expect and accordingly I can open myself up as well as possible prepare for the test. In principle, there is very little where I have absolutely no idea what to expect. That takes a lot of the pressure off. “
In this context, Anton points out that he does not come straight from school like many others and could just try again next year, but at 25 and another previous degree, he definitely wants to start studying physiotherapy in the coming semester. That was exactly the main reason for him to attend a preparatory course “absolutely”: “I could have prepared myself, but it was a good start that you got a very good overview of the exam material. Then you can really prepare optimally for the individual sub-areas. “
The question and answer session in the course with a student who made it the second time in the previous year was also helpful. That was particularly practical, as the test content hadn’t changed much in recent years.
Anton also took a close look at the trial test at and worked through many tasks from various books. Here, too, the course helped him because after the course he was “very sure which of the tasks in the exercise book I had to concentrate on.”
“What problems did you encounter during the written entrance test?”
So well prepared, it wasn’t a big surprise when we called again after the ranking test and he told me that everything went well. With the series of figures alone, he “couldn’t look at the last six examples because I got a little bit wrong over time.” Otherwise, however, he was able to work on all the tasks “in some way”. As it turned out in the meantime, this form seems to have been exactly the right one, as it is one of the best test participants with a total of 121 out of 148 points.
His good preparation paid off, especially when it came to quantitative problem solving: Anton finished before the time ran out and was, therefore, able to take a closer look at two tasks.
Anton told me more about both tasks:
For one task, a praline had a radius X. That’s why I thought the task was: What must the volume of the box be for the praline to fit in? Then I knew straight away: Radius times two for the diameter, then I have the side length of the cube and then I can use it to calculate the volume.
However, what was needed was the surface of the chocolate box. That was not radius to the power of three (r ^ 3), but radius to the power of two times six (r ^ 2 * 6), because a cube has six sides. Luckily I noticed that.
A rule of three, a ^ 2 + b ^ 2 + c ^ 2 (Pythagorean theorem), was also included. That’s not really difficult either, but you had to read it from the text: There were three friends standing in front of each other, and somewhere in the text it said that one was exactly 90 degrees to the other. You then have to think through what the hypotenuse is and what the two cathects are. You have to come to that and then pull the roots again. I am sure that many of them were surely overwhelmed because you simply do not prepare for it. These are these examples where they want to throw you out a bit. So keep basic geometry in mind.
In general, Anton was “hardly really surprised by anything.” Direct proportional arithmetic was well covered by the course and did not cause any problems. In this context, Anton saw tasks that were not particularly complicated when there were, for example, four people “and you had to calculate how large a person’s share would be if one had three times as much as the other.”
More complex systems of equations were the only tasks that were “a bit more complicated,” such as the following task:
One example was about calculating possibilities: You have to do three training courses and two of these training courses have to be in pool A. There are six different courses in Pool A and you can never do the same course twice. How many combinations are there? The answer was then 2 to the power of 6 plus 8 (2 ^ 6 + 8) because there were 4 courses each in pools B and C.
Overall, it is also important to be quick in the quantitative sub-area: Anton only had 45 minutes for 24 tasks: “If you realize during preparation that you are way too slow, you still have to work on it.” In general, time management is very important and You should roughly estimate beforehand how much time you have for each task in order not to run into time constraints: “There really is no point in sitting on an example for five minutes.”
The course provided good tips for the estimation tasks so that you can solve them within a few seconds: “For example, you should first look at the thousands digit and then what number the result should end with: If you have 42 times 24, then it has to end on 8. So you can sift out a bit with multiple choice. “
Anton found it difficult to prepare for prospects. Many examples for preparation showed three pictures, but in the ranking test itself, there were only two pictures: the left cube, which could be seen from the front, and then the right cube, which was rotated.
Anton did not prepare for the language feeling part and was annoyed about it during the test:
Reading the newspapers before the test is worth its weight in gold. Apparently, I did not write down correctly for a feeling for language that you are definitely doing something good for yourself if you read many newspapers. Ms. Traxler had said during the course that we should read the newspaper above all before the interview so that we could be a little bit involved in the day-to-day events if we were asked about it. This is also a good tip for the feeling for language part because it is almost the only thing that helps.
The correct answers are often the ones that are established because they are the idioms a journalist would use. Of course, you can also help yourself a lot by considering which word goes with which verb and what goes with the object. But sometimes there are three words among the answers that all mean the same thing. Then you have to think about what a journalist would write.
Anton himself reads a lot of English-language literature and news. He has also been watching series and films in English since he was at school in the USA. That is why he honestly admitted that “I sometimes just miss the vocabulary.”
In the conclusions this time there were no absurd conclusions at all: “Personally, I had concentrated very much on the absurd conclusions in the preparation, because those are the ones where general logic does not help. If it says “some”, it may be, for example, that a statement can no longer be deduced. This time, however, there were no absurd conclusions at all, just normal text conclusions. They were also very complex further down the line. “
At one point Anton even had to do the math again when drawing the conclusions:
In between, it was also about something that has dropped 20 percent to a value. The statement was then: “That means, the value was over X in the previous year.” In the middle of it, I had to pull out the paper again and do a percentage calculation, which was quite stressful, and in this case, I was not prepared for it either.
In general, you should definitely not only prepare yourself for the absurd conclusions, recommends Anton, as they may not even occur. Because here, too, it is important to be quick again: Anton had to solve almost 60 conclusions within half an hour.
In the case of word analogies, 24 examples had to be solved in just 8 minutes: “That means you had to work on three tasks per minute in order to get through the time. That sounds like a lot, but on the other hand, a word analogy quickly settles itself: You don’t have to read a lot, you have five possible answers and most of the time it is straightforward. But you have to make sure that you don’t get stuck somewhere. Because then you definitely have stress.” In this context, Anton recommends practicing with books as much as possible and the exercise sheets from the preparatory course were also helpful here.
“What gave you problems with the job-specific aptitude test?”
After such thorough preparation, Anton easily made it to the next round with 121 points: the job-specific aptitude test was waiting. But even after this, Anton told me that there were “no big surprises” for him. This was also due to the fact that, in addition to the experiences the test participant had reported on in the course in previous years, he also obtained information from so many current physiotherapy students: “They told me how they did with the various stations and gave me tips. The more information, the better. Then you are not so surprised and not so nervous. “
There was a surprise for A .. However, it turned out to be positive:
There was an exercise about doing exercises on different words: running, blue, and lawn. Three words that appeared several times in a text that was then played to me several times by an MP3. Every time the word came up, I had to do something about it. A jump in the air for running, a jumping jack for blue, and a squat for the word lawn.
Before that, I had heard that there are four terms and, above all, more difficult terms. That’s why I was a bit scared before the exercise because while I was practicing I noticed that it didn’t work at all. I couldn’t remember the four words so quickly because they are only read out very briefly once and the MP3 with the text is only played once. Fortunately, there were only three words in the aptitude test, but I still don’t know the third word – lawn or meadow. I then just decided on one, did the squats accordingly, and hoped I wouldn’t miss too many points.
“What was the most difficult part of the interview?”
With a generally good basic feeling, Anton went to the admission interview with the examination board a few weeks later. An important tip that he had received beforehand was to exchange ideas with the other examinees before approaching the examination board together. In his case, there were six of them and were able to get to know each other a little while registering. So you should definitely be there 30 to 20 minutes before the start.
At the beginning of the official examination, however, the first thing to do was to prepare a poster:
We had ten minutes to design our posters: 1. Training or professional career, 2. Personal commitment, 3. Internships and reasons for the fascination of the profession of physiotherapist, 4. Personal positive qualities and strengths.
With a few drawings, his poster once again looked particularly lively. In addition, Anton had considered three weaknesses beforehand, which he did not have to mention, however.
After the ten minutes were up, Anton and his five colleagues were asked into a semicircle of armchairs and they were given 20 different terms: “A few were clearly positive qualities that a physiotherapist should be, others were qualities that a physiotherapist doesn’t really have Then a psychologist explained to them, “that each of us chooses a term and within 30 minutes we should rank these six terms from 1 to 6; from the most important to the least important property. “
By getting to know each other before the actual appointment, “we then discussed quite well with each other and everyone was always very careful not to interrupt the other and let the others finish speaking.” Anton felt that she was, therefore “relative homogeneous group” and believes that in a social profession in particular,“ a kind of class association is not bad in itself so that you can see that everyone communicates quite well with one another. ”In general, Anton had the impression that it was really crucial in the conversation that “we treat each other respectfully and let everyone have their say.” You should “not push your own word, but also agree to other people and help you to show your own social skills. It is important,
Then the six applicants were sorted alphabetically and it was Anton’s turn to present his poster for about ten minutes. Everything went smoothly and he was even able to mention his enthusiasm for sports as a reason for his choice of studies. He was only briefly interrupted during the internships, as he had to show not just one, but two confirmed internships: “If it doesn’t work out beforehand, you can also submit the confirmations during an interview in Graz.” Anton does not have either internship that lasted longer than two days. So if you are still unsure how you can cope with two internships within a short period of time, you should keep this in mind.
He was able to bring in another tip that Anton had taken from his preparatory course towards the end of the conversation: “I did a bit of website research and found out that is organizing an international physiotherapy conference in the fall. I was able to contribute that to the point why I only applied in Sydney. “
In general, Anton has a very good feeling and will find out the final result at the beginning of July. With extensive preparation, you don’t have to worry either and can tackle all stages of the admission process with a clear conscience and with a good feeling.
