How Many People Sit the Gamsat Each Year?

Official figures are not released but extrapolating from the number of universtity courses which use Gamsat as part of the selection process we estimate that as of 2021 the number of people who sit Gamsat each year is approximately 15,000.

ACER who run Gamsat release very few official statistics about the test so we don't know for sure the exact number but we can make a pretty good estimation.

The last year we know for sure the number is from 2014 when ACER published an article written jointly with the University of Western Australia, Deakin University and the Peninsula School of Medicine in the UK.

The article was titled "GAMSAT: A 10-year retrospective overview, with detailed analysis of candidates’ performance in 2014" and was published in Biomed Central Medical Education.

ACER  called this article a study but in reality it was little more than the publication of various statistics which they had been collecting on the Gamsat over the previous 10 years.

The only statistic which interests us for the purpose of this article is the revelation that in 2014 the number of people who sat Gamsat was 9307.

How Many People Sit Gamsat Now?

But we're now in 2021, is there any more up to date information on how many people sit Gamsat each year now?

Students Sitting GAMSAT
Students Sitting GAMSAT

Unfortunately ACER have not published any more official statistics in the subsequent years, however we can make some reasonable estimates based on the growth in the number of academic institutions using the Gamsat to select candidates for their courses.

Let's take as our starting point that in 2014 twelve Australian universities, seven UK universities and four Irish universities used Gamsat. To these we can add the Oceania University of Medicine located in Western Samoa. So 24 institutions in total.

While in Australia the number of universities using Gamsat has remained static at twelve, outside Australia there has been increasing adoption of Gamsat since 2014.

In the United Kingdom the number of universities using Gamsat has risen from seven to twelve. To these we can add two new universities in Poland, Jagiellonian University Medical College and Poznan University of Medical Sciences, in Israel Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and finally also the American University of the Carribean.

This brings the latest total of institutions using Gamsat up from 24 in 2014 to 32 currently.

Over the same time period the number of Gamsat testing centres has also increased.

For the March sitting in 2014 there were 17 test centres around the world where candidates could take the test. By 2019 (the last year before Gamsat went online) there were 19. And for the September sitting the number increased even more from 8 to 14

In addition to this, it was noted in ACER's 2014 article that the number of candidates repeating the test i.e. taking it more than once, had increased by 14% a trend which is likely to have continued, further swelling the ranks of Gamsat candidates.

Further Resources

For more help with GAMSAT check out Griffiths Gamsat Review Home Study System which takes you step by step through all three sections with advanced strategies for each.

Griffiths GAMSAT Review Home Study System
Griffiths GAMSAT Review Home Study System