The results are in…

No, not them! HPAT results!

I was right in saying one thing – I didn’t know if my HPAT results would be awful or brilliant, because they actually lay somewhere in between… I got 173, which puts my in the 72nd percentile. When I first got the results I was over the moon, but then I realised…72nd percentile…shouldn’t it be higher? So I went and checked the 2010 percentile curve, and sure enough if you were in the 72nd percentile last year, you’d have approx. 165 points in the HPAT.

Naturally, disappointment set in – I will not know for sure if I’ll get medicine until August. I didn’t do definitively good or bad in the HPAT. Just alright. I badly need my most optimistic estimate of my LC points now (565) to stand a chance of getting medicine. I can only wait until the results now, and I’m not the most patient of people at the best of times… I’ve sorted out my CAO form, but it doesn’t really matter, I’m fairly sure that if I don’t get medicine I’ll go back and repeat the entire thing – LC and HPAT. I might as well give this a proper shot and not spend the rest of my life wondering “what if”. Going and repeating the LC and trying for undergraduate medicine makes more sense than going and trying to enter postgraduate medicine after another degree. Besides, repeating could be a good thing – I’d be more mature and older entering college and bla bla bla. I didn’t do TY or anything, I’ll only be 18 in October.

I can’t help but feel a bit of anger at the HPAT. Why did the results increase? Are they not meant to remain the same year on year? It’d be terrible if you got 175 or something in your HPAT last year and decided to only repeat your LC this year – your 175 in last year’s HPAT would only put you in around the 74th percentile, but you’d have been in the 80somethingth percentile last year. There badly needs to be a rethink – if repeats are pushing up the HPAT’s standard, that means repeating will be, once again, almost a prerequisite to getting medicine.

Till August – enjoy your summer! 🙂

2 thoughts on “The results are in…”

  1. Jesus looks like even if you got 660 points you still would have been off medicine in UCD by some 10 points… and that’s with 660 points. SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY! Lord knows what future students will be thinking about medicine, honestly it looks impossible to get in. But remember lads, there’s lives on the line! Best of luck Richard, hope you got into TCD or wherever, don’t really know what happened to their points.

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