Thought and Content
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Once you’re feeling confident with your timing, you can focus on how to go from a good essay to a great one. GAMSAT assessors mark essays against two criteria:
- Thought and Content
- Organisation and Expression
Understanding what these mean and focusing on how you meet them will boost your score.
Thought and Content is all about showing sophisticated thinking.
When you explore a viewpoint, ask yourself:
- What are the consequences of this perspective?
- What does it assume?
- When might this be true?
- When might it not be true?
- What are the broader implications?
This analytical depth is what distinguishes thoughtful essays from superficial ones. It demonstrates the quality of your thinking more powerfully than the eloquence of your prose.
The strongest essays build progressively towards synthesis. Your body paragraphs aren’t just disconnected observations about pros and cons. They work together to help you reach a reasoned, nuanced position.
As you explore both sides, ask yourself:
- How does each side relate to the other?
- Are there conditions under which one perspective is more valid?
- What patterns emerge from considering both sides?
- What underlying principles account for both perspectives?
The most sophisticated essays identify principles or patterns that make sense of different viewpoints. Your conclusion should draw together the threads from your body paragraphs, showing how the different perspectives you explored relate to each other and lead you to your position.
Synthesis demonstrates that you can think at a higher level, finding coherence and meaning across apparently conflicting views.
How you engage with comments and develop your examples is also crucial to scoring well for Thought and Content. The goal is to show that you can think beyond surface-level observations to understand deeper meanings, wider applications and underlying principles.
When you use examples, ensure they illuminate the wider relevance of the theme.
Even personal examples should illustrate principles that apply broadly to human experience, not just one unique individual’s situation. Linking examples to their broader significance demonstrates that you can move flexibly between the universal and the specific.
Similarly, when examining shared assumptions across comments, explore what those assumptions overlook and identify circumstances where they hold true versus where they don’t.
This kind of interconnected, sophisticated analysis produces more nuanced, higher-scoring essays.
The themes in GAMSAT Section II are deliberately complex.
Essays that score highly for Thought and Content show sophisticated thinking. They acknowledge that:
- Both perspectives have merit in different circumstances.
- Overall issues depend on specific conditions or contexts.
- Nuanced distinctions matter.
To show that you’ve acknowledged and embraced a theme’s complexity, you might examine the assumptions on which questions themselves rest or the patterns of when each perspective prevails.
This doesn’t mean refusing to take a stance. Rather, it means your stance emerges from careful consideration of complexity. You might:
- Conclude that one perspective is valid under certain conditions but not others.
- Identify a unifying principle that explains when each viewpoint holds true.
Engaging with complexity demonstrates mature thinking. It shows you can handle ambiguity and think through difficult questions carefully, rather than oversimplifying to reach easy answers.
Section II does not test a set curriculum, and there are no ‘right’ answers.
However, there are clear preparation strategies that can help you prepare for whatever theme comes your way on Test Day and boost your score for Thought and Content.
In the lead-up to the exam, make sure you read widely. This means:
- Reading different formats: Books, articles and blogs can all be helpful in widening your perspective; even listening to podcasts or the radio can be beneficial, though you need to ensure you’re engaging actively rather than just having them on in the background.
- Reading from different sources: Many sources, such as newspapers, take a consistent stance on certain issues; varying your sources means you’re most likely to encounter different perspectives and ideas as you prepare for Section II.
- Reading on different themes: Be on the lookout for reading material on different topics, particularly topics that you’re unfamiliar with or are less frequently addressed in popular media.
Being familiar with a wide range of sources and ideas will prime you for the different sides of whatever theme comes up on Test Day.
Get into the habit of thinking critically. This means that you don’t simply accept what you read at face value.
Instead, you should consider:
- Where a perspective might have come from.
- Whether it’s applicable in some situations but not others.
- What assumptions the perspective relies on.
These are exactly the same questions that strong Section II essays address.
When you’re reading, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is the writer biased?
- Has the writer made any assumptions?
- How valid are those assumptions?
- What are the limitations of the writer’s perspective?
- Is the writer’s argument logically consistent?
Thinking critically as you read will hone your analytical skills and help you draw out new ideas and perspectives beyond what’s literally on the page.
Even better, once you’re in the habit of asking yourself these questions, you’ll be able to critically examine the quality of your own writing. This will help you identify ways to improve.
This will train you to understand the underlying ideas and select relevant examples to make a coherent, successful argument.
Although your essays on Test Day will come to a genuine conclusion that you really believe in, developing this flexibility during your preparation will train you to look for nuance and depth in whatever theme you encounter.
Walkthrough
Developing your thinking
Let’s look at how to read a source critically.
Identifying where your approach to Thought and Content needs improving is a key part of every student’s journey to writing great Section II responses. Knowing what to look out for will help your revision and practice essays, as well as guiding you as you write your essays on Test Day.
Essays are unlikely to score highly for Thought and Content if they simply acknowledge that there are arguments for both sides without genuinely exploring those arguments. Treating each perspective superficially — mentioning them without real analysis or depth — fails to demonstrate quality thinking.
When you find yourself merely describing what different perspectives say, without analysing what they mean or imply, you’re not thinking deeply enough. If your essay feels like a list of observations rather than a developed, insightful argument, you need to push your analysis further.
Weak Section II essays often have a superficial understanding of the theme. They might identify only one of the core concepts, or misidentify the relationship between two core concepts.
If your essay is centred around just one of the core concepts or doesn’t grasp the specificity of the theme, it will be hard to develop nuanced and critical responses to it.
One sign that you might need to re-evaluate the theme is if you’re struggling to come up with specific and complex ideas. Alternatively, you might find that you’ve missed the complexity of the theme and are therefore trying to include ideas that are too broad and disparate.
Walkthrough
Identifying ways to improve
Let’s identify ways to improve an essay's Thought and Content score.