The 92 Journey

How to Use This Book

This is not a textbook. It is not a collection of essay templates. It is a thinking system — built from the experience of scoring 92 in Section 2 of the GAMSAT, and from years of studying what separates an 80+ essay from everything below it.

Every section of this book serves one purpose: to change how you think when you sit in front of a blank page with 35 minutes on the clock. You will not leave this book with a formula. You will leave it with a mind that has been trained to see deeper, argue more clearly, and write more honestly than the competition.

THE ONE RULE

Read every chapter once for understanding. Then return to each with a pen and do the exercises. Passive reading changes nothing. Active practice changes everything.

SECTION 01

The 92 Journey

What changed — and why

The first time I sat the GAMSAT, I scored 66 in Section 2. I thought that was decent. I was wrong. I had written two competent essays. Organised. Clear. Forgettable.

I had done what most students do: I had produced essays that were safe. I made a clear argument. I used examples. I stayed on topic. And I was awarded marks for all of that — marks that sat comfortably in the low-to-mid range, just like thousands of other students who had written exactly the same kind of thing.

What I Was Getting Wrong

After that sitting, I read everything I could about Section 2. I asked for feedback. I read high-scoring essays from students who had shared their work online. And I noticed something I hadn't expected: the best essays didn't feel like GAMSAT essays. They felt like something a thoughtful, interesting person had written about something they genuinely cared about. They were specific. They were surprising. They had a point of view.

My essays had none of that. Here is what I was actually doing wrong:

• Writing for safety. I was afraid to take a strong position, so my essays sat on the fence. The examiner had no idea what I actually thought.
• Being generic. My examples were the first ones that came to mind — Mandela, Einstein, World War II. The examiner had seen them a thousand times.
• Describing instead of analysing. I was telling the examiner what happened, not what it meant, why it mattered, or what it revealed about the human condition.
• Performing intelligence. I was using complex vocabulary and long sentences to seem smart. The prose was dense and hard to read. Intelligence is not complexity — it is clarity.
• Ignoring emotion. My essays were cold. They had no voice, no humanity, no sense that a real person had written them.

What Changed

Between my first and second sitting, I stopped practising essays. I started practising thinking. I spent weeks doing what I now call Depth Drilling — taking a single idea and pushing it further than felt comfortable. I asked, every time: but what does that actually mean? Who does it hurt? What does it assume? What would someone smarter than me say back?

I started keeping a philosophy journal. Not to memorise quotes — to interrogate ideas. I started noticing the complexity in ordinary life: the ethics of convenience, the politics of gratitude, the loneliness inside success. I began to see essay prompts not as questions to answer but as windows into something worth looking at carefully.

I stopped asking: "What should I write?" I started asking: "What do I actually think about this — and why is it more complicated than it first appears?" That question is worth more than any template.

The Result

In my second sitting I scored 92. I didn't write longer essays. I didn't use more quotes. I didn't follow a stricter structure. I wrote essays that said something — that had a perspective, a voice, and a visible intelligence operating behind every sentence. I wrote essays that surprised me as I wrote them. And that surprise, I believe, is what the examiner felt too.

REFLECTION EXERCISE

Before reading the next chapter: write one sentence answering this question. "The last time I found an idea genuinely interesting, it was about..." Don't overthink it. That sentence is the beginning of your Section 2 voice.