How I Sobered Up to Ace One of the Toughest Exams in the World

Michael Sutherland has blazed an unconventional path to success. He doesn’t necessarily look like a medical exam aficionado, but at just 28 years of age he’s recently nailed the highest ever score in the written component of Australia’s primary postgraduate medical exam—and one of the highest ever scores overall.

For the uninitiated, the GAMSAT, or “Graduate Medical School Admissions Test”, is one of the most difficult academic exams a person can take in Australia or the UK. The four-plus-hour test—broken up into a humanities section, a written communication section, and a two-hour biology and physics section—is designed to assess an individual’s analytical and critical thinking skills, as well as how they organise and…