Verdict:
As with every test, practice makes perfect. While the ability to prepare is often downplayed, it is evident through MedEntry’s statistics that the improvement in results is clear. Speaking on behalf of friends and siblings and myself, it has made a stellar impact on HPAT preparation and has made the experience much more straightforward. The course teaches to take on the exam with full confidence and make a genuine, best possible attempt for the candidate. It works with you at your pace and gives total freedom to do as much preparation as required. I have found it to be an invaluable asset in my preparation and I have no doubt others find the same.Pros:
ValueQuality
Amount of material
Detailed answers
Progress tracking
Cons:
CostlyRequires self-motivation
Tricky to understand (at first)
Ratings:
Key features:
Review price: €595
Course: MedEntry
10 practice exams included
Optional 5 extra exams
3 courses to choose from
Begins from €295
Recently they have also added a feature accessible from the home page suggesting drills for you to complete. This is fantastic as I often find myself unsure of the best drill to do. They suggest one "Drill of the day" as well as "A drill for you". They are a good way of deciding what drill to do. The "A drill for you" also recommends drills based on already completed ones. This is a very handy feature and one I'm excited to use more often!
I have found the drills to be similarly useful to the practice exams as they offer information on how you compared to the other cohort of Medentry students. This is fantastic as the Eureka question bank doesn’t offer this and I have found this to be useful for deciding if I should have gotten the question right or not. For each answer, a percentage is given for the amount of Medentry students chose that answer. This means that if a question was particularly hard and very few got it right it is clear to see when looking through the solutions. I found this incredibly useful and it definitely adds a lot to the course.
Website: The Medentry website is nicely laid out and easy to use. Everything is neatly organized into different categories and sections which is very helpful considering the sheer amount of different pages of drills and information there are to be found on the site. I found it very handy that the site logs which sections have been completed not only for drills and exams but for other things such as tutorials. This makes it really easy to keep track of all pages which you’ve visited while seeing which ones are completely finished. There’s no catching the system out as it only marks completed when you have viewed every single page in each module. The site never crashed for me and I found it to be great at saving answers while going along which meant I didn’t have to worry about doing this manually all the time!
The site works by basically separating the normal site from the one with modules, drills and exams. This is called the LMS. Here it is easy to track progress and see what needs to be completed next. There is a home page with progress tracking. Then there are 8 modules and when each one is clicked, resources within that section can be found. Within those are books which are broken down. Before drills, each category generally begins with a video explaining everything about that topic. Then the following pages have more in-depth information of what was discussed on the video.
Practice exams: Included with all Medentry couses are 10 practice exams. These are very representative of the real exam from what I have experienced and these are the most important aspect of the Medentry course in my opinion. I found the practice exams to be the best place to mark my progress and improve along the way. The interactive experience is extremely intuitive and it is a pleasure to use. When beginning an exam, a timer displays on the right-hand side which shows remaining estimated time for the current question. This is perfect for time management skills and means that you know how much or how little time to spend on each individual question.
For correcting the exams, there is an in-depth explanation for every single answer which goes through each answer option individually and explains why it was or wasn’t the correct answer. This is done, without fail, for each question in every exam. In addition, many of the more difficult questions include a video explanation for them. This, for me, was easier to understand than the written explanation especially for complex questions requiring complex thinking. The corrections are where most of the learning is done from the course. Learning why the answer you picked wasn’t the correct one and why another one was is invaluable.
Alongside these in-depth answers, once you have completed an exam, after seeing your instant score you have the ability to retry incorrectly answered questions. This is good to do after finishing the exam before looking at the solutions as it gives a chance to put more thought into each of these questions knowing the first answer given is incorrect. That is generally what I did and then I looked at the ones I got wrong for the second time. I looked at the solutions for them and then I retried my incorrect questions once again to make sure I understood why I got them wrong and see that I understand how to get the answer. The system allows you to retry wrongly answered questions from each attempt four times.
Sadly, there is no physical format for the practice exams so you will be confined to completing them online however it is likely that this is to prevent copying which is understandable. I saw that some of the other courses actually do offer physical formats so if this is important for you then just note this feature won’t be found on Medentry. Their other safeguard is that they log each launch of the LMS from your account through the IP address and if they detect any account sharing they will block the account.
App: This is one major advantage Medentry has over competition. They have built a brilliant, easy-to use app which works very well alongside the online LMS platform. Within this app you can find Eureka! questions, curriculum material as well as all the drills from the online version. Although, note that at time of writing practice exams are not possible to complete on the app. This is fine as it would not be a good idea to do the exam on such a small screen anyway! To be honest, the app is actually more straightforward than the website to understand and it’s a shame that the website isn’t layed out slightly more clearly like the app. Once you’ve been using it for a while you learn how it works but at the beginning it is quite daunting! It takes a while to learn where everything is placed and what should be done in which order. Although, it all becomes clear after using it for a few hours.
Competition: There a number of alternatives to Medentry on the market. The main ones are: Dublin Academy, Career services, Institute of education and Ashfield college. These are just a few of the main ones but no doubt there are many more out there. While it is great to have such a selection to choose from, I have found Medentry to be a huge asset though I have not had a chance yet to compare other courses however I will update if given the chance. MedEntry has such a broad range of material alongside the huge amount of students who take part in the course. No doubt it is one of the most widely used courses on the market. This is why all of the statistics from the answered questions are so useful, as they represent a large portion of students preparing for the HPAT. In addition, as they state on their site, scores achieved on the practice exams are generally lower than what would be expected in the real exam. The main reasons for this are the fact that Medentry students are more motivated and capable than the average HPAT participant and they say that the exams are as difficult if not more than the real exams. This reason isn’t as important as you are being ranked with a percentile instead of a score so the ranking is the most important indicator.
Price: Beginning with the base Medentry package you will find their online course available for 295€. In my opinion, this is very reasonable as the course, if used correctly, has the ability to significantly increase one’s chances of achieving the required score in the HPAT. However, I strongly recommend going for the platinum package. While I have not taken part in the 2-day workshop yet I have heard testimonies from friends and siblings that this is the most worthwhile course to take part in. I will also update this when I have had a chance to take part in the course. It is quite expensive at 595€ so I whole-heartedly recommend finding someone else who will take part with you as this will decrease the cost to 425€. If you don’t know anyone taking part in the course you could go to your career guidance teacher at school and see if they can tell you someone else who might be interested in doing it with you. This will see a saving of 170€ for you. This is a huge discount and worth taking advantage of if possible. There is also the Diamond package although I’m sure this is the least common one taken. Very few would be willing to spend 1195€ on HPAT preparation although if one needs to get the points in the HPAT then I can see how this package would make a significant impact on their points. If you are considering going for this one, I would encourage you to consider if you would be happy to pay 600€ for a Medentry tutor. Perhaps this may be of interest to some although I haven’t taken part in this option and I don’t know someone who has so I’m unable to comment on the effectiveness of it!
Practice exams: Included with all Medentry couses are 10 practice exams. These are very representative of the real exam from what I have experienced and these are the most important aspect of the Medentry course in my opinion. I found the practice exams to be the best place to mark my progress and improve along the way. The interactive experience is extremely intuitive and it is a pleasure to use. When beginning an exam, a timer displays on the right-hand side which shows remaining estimated time for the current question. This is perfect for time management skills and means that you know how much or how little time to spend on each individual question.
Alongside these in-depth answers, once you have completed an exam, after seeing your instant score you have the ability to retry incorrectly answered questions. This is good to do after finishing the exam before looking at the solutions as it gives a chance to put more thought into each of these questions knowing the first answer given is incorrect. That is generally what I did and then I looked at the ones I got wrong for the second time. I looked at the solutions for them and then I retried my incorrect questions once again to make sure I understood why I got them wrong and see that I understand how to get the answer. The system allows you to retry wrongly answered questions from each attempt four times.
Sadly, there is no physical format for the practice exams so you will be confined to completing them online however it is likely that this is to prevent copying which is understandable. I saw that some of the other courses actually do offer physical formats so if this is important for you then just note this feature won’t be found on Medentry. Their other safeguard is that they log each launch of the LMS from your account through the IP address and if they detect any account sharing they will block the account.
App: This is one major advantage Medentry has over competition. They have built a brilliant, easy-to use app which works very well alongside the online LMS platform. Within this app you can find Eureka! questions, curriculum material as well as all the drills from the online version. Although, note that at time of writing practice exams are not possible to complete on the app. This is fine as it would not be a good idea to do the exam on such a small screen anyway! To be honest, the app is actually more straightforward than the website to understand and it’s a shame that the website isn’t layed out slightly more clearly like the app. Once you’ve been using it for a while you learn how it works but at the beginning it is quite daunting! It takes a while to learn where everything is placed and what should be done in which order. Although, it all becomes clear after using it for a few hours.
Competition: There a number of alternatives to Medentry on the market. The main ones are: Dublin Academy, Career services, Institute of education and Ashfield college. These are just a few of the main ones but no doubt there are many more out there. While it is great to have such a selection to choose from, I have found Medentry to be a huge asset though I have not had a chance yet to compare other courses however I will update if given the chance. MedEntry has such a broad range of material alongside the huge amount of students who take part in the course. No doubt it is one of the most widely used courses on the market. This is why all of the statistics from the answered questions are so useful, as they represent a large portion of students preparing for the HPAT. In addition, as they state on their site, scores achieved on the practice exams are generally lower than what would be expected in the real exam. The main reasons for this are the fact that Medentry students are more motivated and capable than the average HPAT participant and they say that the exams are as difficult if not more than the real exams. This reason isn’t as important as you are being ranked with a percentile instead of a score so the ranking is the most important indicator.
Price: Beginning with the base Medentry package you will find their online course available for 295€. In my opinion, this is very reasonable as the course, if used correctly, has the ability to significantly increase one’s chances of achieving the required score in the HPAT. However, I strongly recommend going for the platinum package. While I have not taken part in the 2-day workshop yet I have heard testimonies from friends and siblings that this is the most worthwhile course to take part in. I will also update this when I have had a chance to take part in the course. It is quite expensive at 595€ so I whole-heartedly recommend finding someone else who will take part with you as this will decrease the cost to 425€. If you don’t know anyone taking part in the course you could go to your career guidance teacher at school and see if they can tell you someone else who might be interested in doing it with you. This will see a saving of 170€ for you. This is a huge discount and worth taking advantage of if possible. There is also the Diamond package although I’m sure this is the least common one taken. Very few would be willing to spend 1195€ on HPAT preparation although if one needs to get the points in the HPAT then I can see how this package would make a significant impact on their points. If you are considering going for this one, I would encourage you to consider if you would be happy to pay 600€ for a Medentry tutor. Perhaps this may be of interest to some although I haven’t taken part in this option and I don’t know someone who has so I’m unable to comment on the effectiveness of it!
