How should I prepare for the professional school entrance exam for my chosen healthcare career?

Click here to go directly to preparation advice.

To qualify for admission to UW Oshkosh, you likely took either the SAT or ACT exam during high school. The ACT or SAT tested your general knowledge of language, logic, writing, and quantitative skills.

Health Profession schools also usually require an entrance exam, generally taken 12 months prior to graduating from college. Health Professional school entrance exams will again test your general knowledge of language, logic, writing, and quantitative skills. They may also test your knowledge of certain scientific subjects such as chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, and physics.

It is simple to find out what topics appear on any Professional school entrance exam, and what the question format will be. In fact, you should do that RIGHT NOW (see links at bottom of this page) so that you can plan your college coursework very strategically.   Whenever possible, be sure to have had the courses whose material appears on the exam; i.e. treat the entrance exam as if it were a college course with prerequisites. 

There is a fee for taking any entrance exam.  There may be additional fees for sending out your scores to an institution.  At UW Oshkosh, you may be able to take a practice test for free ahead of time. Check the Healthcare Events Calendar for annoucements.

There is a general trend away from pencil and paper exams, to computer exams. Make sure you have great keyboard skills so that you can quickly and efficiently take a computer exam. Take a keyboarding class if you think you need one!

Entrance exams are variable as to testing schedule.  Some are offered only on certain days of the year. For best results, a year or so ahead of when you think you'll take the test, check out the entrance exam's web page for scheduling information and then plug the exam date into your college plan of study, just as if it were a course you had to take at a particular time. 

Some exams may be given right on the UW Oshkosh campus, in the Testing Center.  Others may require you to travel to Appleton or even Milwaukee or Madison.

Warning: Plan to take the entrance exam no later than 12 weeks before any Professional school application deadline. The reason is, it may take 8 weeks (or more) for your exam score to be released.  If you take the exam too late, your application may not be complete by the deadline and you will have to wait another year to apply to Professional school.

If you do poorly on the entrance exam, you may re-take it. How each Health Profession school views a re-take will differ from school to school, so you need to check each school's admissions policy.  For example, some schools take your highest exam score. Others will take only the most recent score.  Still others will average all scores. 

How should you prepare for the entrance exam? 

• The web sites for the entrance exams usually provide practice questions or even whole exams, to help you get ready.
• Nearly all PreHealth students purchase practice exam books as well. You can get these from bookstores, www.amazon.com, www.ebay.com, or from UW Oshkosh students who don't need them any more.  Connect with more advanced students by joining PHPO. Once you obtain your exam book, make a schedule that sets you down one Saturday morning a week, for example, to devote to taking (and scoring) a practice exam from your book.
• There are also intensive exam-prep companies, such as Kaplan, whose courses can help you prepare for the exam. You may need to travel to Appleton or Milwaukee to complete these courses, although we are trying to get such a course on the UW Oshkosh campus.  Some students find these courses much more effective than the self-study of practice books.
• One recruiter told me that a course in Symbolic Logic (such as UW Oshkosh's Phil 202) can be very helpful preparation for entrance exams.

Dental school entrance exam = DAT,
see http://www.ada.org/prof/ed/testing/dat/index.asp

Graduate Record Exam = GRE,
see http://www.ets.org/gre.  Used by Physician Assistant and Vet schools, for example.

NOTE: the GRE offers several different tests. The "General test" assesses general intellectual skills that would apply to any field of study, not just health professions. Any program that requires the GRE entrance exam requires the General test.

There are also various "Subject tests" that assess content knowledge of specific areas, such as Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology, or Biology, or Chemistry. It is less common for a program to require a Subject test in addition to the General test, but it does sometimes occur. Check the admissions policy of particular schools to know what is expected.

Medical school entrance exam = MCAT,
see http://www.aamc.org/students/mcat/

Optometry school entrance exam = OAT,
see http://www.opted.org/info_oat.cfm

Pharmacy school entrance exam = PCAT,
see http://harcourtassessment.com/haiweb/Cultures/en-US/dotCom/PCATWEB.INFO.htm

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Last updated on 04/26/2007.  Contact webmaster.