The GAMSAT syllabus

One — the subject split. ACER, verbatim: “The Reasoning in Biological and Physical Sciences section is made up of questions in three discipline areas in the following proportions: Chemistry 40%, Biology 40%, Physics 20%.” This has been unchanged since at least the 2020 booklet. It is ACER-official, not provider folklore — which is worth knowing, because a lot of marketing implies the split is inside knowledge.

Two — the assumed level. The knowledge required “generally corresponds to the first year of university studies in biology and chemistry, and A-level/Leaving Certificate/Year 12 in physics. The test however, focuses primarily on problem solving and on the use of the prerequisite knowledge.” That level has not moved in at least six years.

Three — the skills. ACER lists what Section 3 questions must actually make you do: identify knowledge in new contexts, analyse and interpret data, discover relationships, translate knowledge from one form to another, formulate and apply hypotheses, deduce consequences from models, follow and evaluate a line of reasoning, categorise and select relevant information, extrapolate, interpolate, estimate and recognise limits in accuracy.

That third list is the closest thing to a syllabus that exists. It describes operations, not topics — which is the whole design of the exam.

The governing design principle is ACER’s own: “Each question presented will provide you with everything you need to be able to answer the question.” Read literally, that is a promise about scope — anything genuinely obscure has to be handed to you in the stimulus. It is also why memorising constants is such a poor use of time.

The top-level headings below are corroborated across three or four independent providers. The second column is our own calibration of what “first-year university” and “Year 12” mean in practice. Treat it as a map of where to look, not as a specification you can be examined against.

Because there is no official list to check a reconstruction against, the useful test of a topic is not whether it appears on somebody’s syllabus but whether questions written on it behave the way real ones do. That is a question about item quality rather than coverage, and we handle it separately on GAMSAT practice questions— what makes an item representative in each section, and why the free “past paper” PDFs circulating online are the one preparation habit that can cost you marks.

• Calculus of any kind
• Quantum mechanics beyond photon energy and simple atomic spectra
• Relativity beyond E = mc²
• Second- and third-year organic synthesis, named-reaction recall, pericyclic reactions, retrosynthesis
• Detailed gross anatomy, histology, or clinical diagnosis
• Pharmacology beyond mechanism-of-action reasoning supplied in the stimulus
• Formal statistical hypothesis testing — interpreting a stated result is in scope, computing a t-test is not
• Taxonomy as terminology recall
• Memorised pKa values, standard potentials or spectroscopic shift tables

One published UK provider syllabus in this market includes Diels–Alder reactions, sigmatropic rearrangements, Hückel’s rule and the Wiener index. That is well above ACER’s stated first-year ceiling. A maximalist syllabus is evidence of what a course sells, not of what the exam tests.

The practical consequence is that mental arithmetic speed is part of the syllabus, even though it appears in no topic list. Log rules, scientific notation, index laws, ratio reasoning, percentage change, estimating a root, resolving a vector, reading a gradient off a graph. Candidates from non-science backgrounds consistently report that this — not the biology — is what actually costs them time.

Section 1 (62 questions in 100 minutes) tests, in ACER’s words, “skills in the interpretation and understanding of ideas in social and cultural contexts”, using personal, imaginative, expository and argumentative texts. There is no reading list. “Read widely” is the standard advice precisely because nothing narrower can honestly be said.

Section 2 (2 tasks in 65 minutes) assesses “the ability to generate and develop ideas in writing”, on two criteria: the quality of the thinking, and the control and use of language in expressing it. Each response is scored independently three times. Themes are given on the day; there is no list of possible topics.

The only ACER-official statement about low-yield preparation is blunt: “There is little benefit to be gained from last-minute ‘cramming’.” Beyond that, the recurring pattern across providers and candidate reports is that people over-study content depth and under-study application speed. Commonly named as wasted effort:

• Memorising every step of transcription, translation or cellular respiration. Understand what happens when a step is disrupted instead.
• Compiling extensive revision notes rather than working through questions.
• Recalling specific named reactions, pKa values or physics formulae.
• Revising advanced topics in depth. Returns fall away sharply past a critical mass.

One correction worth making explicitly, because it is published by a large provider and widely repeated: ACER states: "All questions have the same value." Marks are NOT weighted by question difficulty.Attempting more questions raises your expected score; attempting the “hard” ones does not pay a bonus.

Treat the tables above as a coverage map, not a curriculum. The productive sequence, given how the exam is actually built:

1. Sit something timed first. A diagnostic tells you which of these rows are genuinely gaps and which just feel intimidating. Our free practice testis timed to ACER’s real limits and costs nothing.
2. Get to a critical mass across the whole map before going deep anywhere. Breadth first is the consistent advice from candidates who improved.
3. Then work in questions, not chapters. Revise a topic when a question exposes it, rather than pre-emptively.
4. Drill the arithmetic separately. It is invisible on every topic list and it is where the time goes.

Our study plan puts that sequence on a timeline.