Dealing With UMAT Section 3

UMAT comprises of a good number of questions on Non Verbal Reasoning. As the name suggests, this section deals with the reasoning of non-verbal, that is, pictorial data. Consisting of roughly one-third of all the questions in the UMAT, these questions are one of the trickiest, and also possibly the most mind-boggling, not least because of the time frame within which they must be completed: which is much less than 2 minutes per question. That is not even taking into account the fact that it can be extremely stressful for the eyes and the brain to go through so many sets of black and white patterns.

But what is even more stressful is that you must get most of them, if not all, correct. This is how a question in non-verbal reasoning looks like:

Q. Select the alternative that most logically and simply continues the series.

drill_sec3_002 drill_sec3_003 drill_sec3_004 drill_sec3_005 drill_sec3_006

Can you answer this above question?

There is only one thing that can see you through this horror, and that is practice. Loads of it. The best part is that you can, indeed, get a lot of help for this section. For one, there are loads of books on non-verbal reasoning available. In fact, if you look closely enough, you will see that even books on puzzles and brain-teasers contain these questions.

In non-verbal reasoning, you would have to either complete the series, find out the sequence that the patterns follow or determine what the missing part of a whole would be.

The biggest problem that you might face in this section is that there is absolutely no verbal cue given along with the patterns. Unlike the other sections, there is just no direction, no explanation of the patterns, which might seem, initially at least, to follow just a random path. For this reason, this section of the papers puts your reasoning skills to test like no other. In order to ensure that you handle this section as best as you can, you must make sure that your observation and logical abilities are at their keenest.

Remember that the patterns that make up the sequences can be very confusing but after you have tried to find a method in the madness, you will find it. At first glance, they are likely to all look very similar, so it is necessary that you look long and hard before you come to any conclusion.