TARA Test 2026/27: The Complete Guide for Oxford & UCL Applicants

TARA — the Test of Academic Reasoning for Admissions — is the admissions test that Oxford and UCL now use, from the 2026/27 application cycle onward, for a defined set of courses across the humanities, social sciences, engineering and computing.

It is sat in one session, split into three separately timed modules:

Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and a Writing Task, taken in that order with no going back to a previous module once it closes.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving are each 22 multiple-choice questions in 40 minutes; the Writing Task gives you 40 minutes and a choice of three prompts, with a maximum of 750 words.

Nothing about your subject knowledge is tested — TARA is designed to measure how you reason and argue, not what you've memorised, which is precisely why it cannot be crammed the way a subject exam can.

TARA is still a genuinely new test.

October 2025 was its first sitting, January 2026 its second, and the October 2026 window covered in this guide is only the third time it has ever run — which is exactly why so much of the commentary already published about it varies in precision, and why dates, course lists and fees are worth double-checking close to when you actually register rather than trusting a screenshot from a previous cycle.

This guide is dated 16 July 2026 and states the source and verification date behind every fact that could plausibly change before the October 2026 sitting — for the full 2026/27 calendar in one place, see our complete TARA dates and registration timeline.

TARA is administered by UAT-UK, and its Content Specification is the primary public document describing exactly what each module covers and how it's marked.

Everything in this guide that concerns format, timing, question types and scoring is drawn directly from that specification and from UAT-UK's own published results explanations, cross-checked on 16 July 2026 against Oxford's own admissions tests page and UCL's own tests, tasks and interviews page.

Where the public sources disagree with each other — and on two points, they genuinely do — this guide says so plainly rather than quietly picking whichever number sounds most confident.

TARA is not a standalone new invention so much as one piece of a much larger shake-up of Oxford's admissions testing, and understanding the scale of that shake-up explains a lot about why TARA looks the way it does.

For 2027 entry — meaning from the 2026 sitting onward — Oxford discontinued eight of its own in-house admissions tests in one go. The Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA) was retired and replaced by TARA.

The Mathematics Admissions Test (MAT) was retired and replaced by the Test of Mathematics for University Admission (TMUA).

The Physics Admissions Test (PAT) and the Biomedical Sciences Admissions Test (BMSAT) were both retired and replaced by a single new Engineering & Science Admissions Test (ESAT).

Four further subject-specific tests — the Classics Admissions Test, the Modern Languages Admissions Test, the Ancient History and Classical Archaeology Admissions Test, and the Philosophy Admissions Test — were dropped entirely, with no direct replacement.

UCAT, used for medicine, and LNAT, used for law, continue unchanged and sit outside this overhaul.

UCL joined the same UAT-UK testing partnership in 2025, adopting both TARA and TMUA for the courses listed further down this page.

That's worth sitting with for a moment:

TARA isn't an Oxford quirk that UCL happens to have picked up as an afterthought.

It's a shared piece of national testing infrastructure that two universities with very different course portfolios have both opted into for the same admissions cycle — see our full UCL TARA course list for exactly which eleven courses that covers.

Here's how that breaks down:

There's a second, separate overhaul sitting just behind this one.

BMAT (the Biomedical Admissions Test) had already been discontinued before TARA existed: its final sitting was autumn 2023, after which Cambridge Assessment Admissions Testing stopped delivering admissions tests altogether, a closure that also moved STEP to OCR and TMUA/ESAT to UAT-UK.

The seven universities that had used BMAT — Imperial College London, Oxford, Cambridge, Lancaster, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UCL, and Leeds — all moved to UCAT for 2025-entry applicants onward.

That change predates TARA and isn't directly part of the same rollout, but it's part of the same broader pattern: a cluster of long-standing, university-specific admissions tests being retired within a few years of each other and folded into shared national testing bodies.

Our three-way TARA vs TSA vs BMAT comparison goes deeper on how BMAT's move to UCAT fits alongside TARA's own rollout.

TARA is sat as a single appointment made up of three modules, each separately timed and taken in a fixed order.

Once a module's clock runs out, you move on and cannot return to it — there is no flicking back to Critical Thinking once you've started Problem Solving. Calculators and dictionaries are banned throughout the entire test, including the Writing Task.

Here's what that looks like:

That's 120 minutes of testing time in total, taken back to back in one sitting.

Because there's no penalty for a wrong answer on either multiple-choice module, there's no scenario where guessing costs you more than leaving a question blank — every question is worth attempting, even under time pressure near the end of a module.

If you want to feel what that time pressure actually does to your decision-making before test day, register free and try a timed set rather than reading about it in the abstract.

Critical Thinking covers seven named question types:

Identifying the Main Conclusion, Drawing a Conclusion, Identifying an Assumption, Assessing the Impact of Additional Evidence, Detecting Reasoning Errors, Matching Arguments, and Applying Principles.

Problem Solving covers three:

Relevant Selection, Finding Procedures, and Identifying Similarity, drawing on a maths appendix that stays deliberately modest — simple fractions, place value, percentages, the four rules of number, calculating an average (mean), time, money and measures, metric unit relationships such as 1km = 1000m and 1kg = 1000g (imperial conversions are not tested), and the area, perimeter and volume of rectangles and boxes, plus reading graphs, charts and tables.

None of it goes beyond what's ordinarily covered before GCSE; the difficulty in Problem Solving comes from working out which of those basic tools a question actually needs and applying it under time pressure, not from the underlying maths itself.

We've written a full breakdown of all seven Critical Thinking types, with real worked questions, in our TARA Critical Thinking guide, and a dedicated breakdown of the three Problem Solving types and the maths appendix in our TARA Problem Solving guide.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving are scored separately, each on a scale from 1.0 (low) to 9.0 (high), reported to one decimal place.

There is no combined or averaged score across the two modules — universities that use TARA see both figures independently, which means it's entirely possible to score strongly on one and only around average on the other; our guide to why these are two separate numbers goes deeper on what that actually means for your application.

The Writing Task is not marked at all; instead, a copy of what you wrote is sent directly to every university you applied to that requires TARA, for admissions tutors to read and weigh however their own course sees fit.

UAT-UK has published its own description of how scores are distributed, based on the October 2025 and January 2026 sittings — the two sittings that have actually happened so far.

In their own words, the scale is designed so that a typical candidate scores around 4.5, and roughly the top 10% of candidates score above 7.0.

Scores are capped at 1.0 on the low end and 9.0 on the high end, so nobody is reported outside that range regardless of raw performance.

Beyond those two figures, UAT-UK has not published an exact percentile table, only histograms: reading those charts visually, Critical Thinking scores cluster most heavily between 3.0 and 6.5 with peaks around 3.0 and 4.5, while Problem Solving clusters a little higher, peaking around 4.5 to 5.5.

We break down the shape of both distributions in more detail, including what counts as a strong score for a competitive course.

Treat that shape description as an approximate read of the published charts rather than an exact percentage, since UAT-UK hasn't released the underlying numbers behind them.

For the full breakdown of what those two sittings' results actually looked like, and what counts as a genuinely competitive score for the course you're applying to, see our dedicated TARA scoring guide.

And if you'd rather see where a practice attempt would land you than keep reading about the scale in the abstract, you can start working through the practice bank free and get a feel for it directly.

Here's where the key numbers sit:

This is the point where a lot of general TARA overviews get vague, or quietly assume TARA is only relevant to humanities applicants. It isn't.

Oxford's list is genuinely narrow and clustered around the humanities and social sciences; UCL's list is much broader, spanning engineering, computer science and robotics as well as social sciences — UCL's own Computer Science TARA page confirms the requirement course by course if you want the primary source.

If you're applying to UCL for a technical course, don't assume TARA doesn't apply to you just because most general commentary on it is written with PPE or Human Sciences applicants in mind — our full UCL course-by-course breakdown covers exactly which technical courses are included.

Course requirements are set independently by each university and can change between admissions cycles — the Mechanical Engineering addition above is a live example of that happening.

Always confirm against your specific course's own page at application time rather than relying on any third-party summary, this one included.

Oxford and UCL also don't necessarily weigh a TARA score the same way once it's in front of an admissions tutor.

Each university, and often each department within it, decides independently how much the score matters relative to predicted grades, the personal statement and (where relevant) an interview, and that weighting can differ meaningfully between a course like PPE at Oxford and a course like Computer Science at UCL, simply because the two departments are looking for different things.

This guide deliberately doesn't guess at a single weighting figure across every course, since none is published centrally — our course-specific guides to TARA at Oxford and TARA at UCL go deeper on what's actually known about how each university uses the score.

Oxford and UCL run TARA on different timelines, and the two universities' own published information doesn't fully agree on every detail. Here's what's confirmed for each, stated plainly where the sources conflict rather than smoothed over.

Oxford: October 2026 sitting only

UCL: October 2026 or January 2027 sitting

Unlike Oxford, UCL applicants choose between two sittings — see our full breakdown of the Oxford-vs-UCL registration difference if you're weighing which one suits your application timeline.

UCL's general registration windows are:

Fees

UAT-UK's own registration and bursary page confirms the current fee directly:

£78 for UK and Republic of Ireland candidates, and £133 for candidates registering from elsewhere.

That resolves a discrepancy we'd previously flagged between a UCL page stating £75/£130 and other sources quoting £78/£133 — UAT-UK is the test administrator and the authoritative source on its own fee, so treat £78/£133 as the current confirmed figure, while still checking the live number before you book, since fees can change between admissions cycles.

Bursary vouchers are available for UK candidates in financial need, covering the test free of charge, with applications for the October 2026 and January 2027 sittings opening 1 June — see our full bursary voucher guide for eligibility and how to apply, and our complete fees breakdown for the full 2026/27 picture across both universities.

If you've come across TSA past papers, older sibling's notes, or a tutor still teaching from TSA materials, it's worth knowing exactly how much of that carries over — because the honest answer is: a lot of the thinking, not much of the format.

TSA used the exact same seven Critical Thinking question type names and the exact same three Problem Solving question type names that TARA uses now, with a near-identical maths appendix and a near-identical worked-example teaching style.

That's a directly verified structural match between the two tests' own official guides, not an inference or a marketing claim.

What changed is the administration format, not the underlying skill being tested.

Standard TSA was 50 questions in a single 90-minute sitting — 25 Problem Solving and 25 Critical Thinking questions interspersed together, presented roughly in order of difficulty.

TARA instead splits those same two skill areas into two separate 40-minute, 22-question modules, taken one after the other rather than mixed.

TSA Oxford also added an optional 30-minute writing task with a choice of four prompts for most courses; TARA's Writing Task is a compulsory third module for everyone sitting it, worth 40 minutes, with a choice of three prompts rather than four.

The practical takeaway: if you or your school already have TSA Critical Thinking or Problem Solving practice materials, they remain genuinely useful preparation, because the skill being tested hasn't changed — only the packaging has.

What doesn't transfer as cleanly is timing practice done under the old 90-minute mixed format, since pacing yourself across 50 interspersed questions is a meaningfully different exercise from pacing two clean 22-question blocks — which is exactly the kind of thing that's easier to feel than to read about.

Register free and see it on a real question rather than taking our word for it. For the full detail on the administration changes, see our TSA vs TARA guide.

The rest of this cluster goes deep on each module individually. Here's a short, honest preview of what each one actually involves, so you know where to go next depending on what you need to prepare for first.

Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking tests whether you can take an argument apart: separate its conclusion from the reasons offered in support of it, spot an assumption nobody stated out loud, judge whether a new piece of evidence would strengthen or weaken the case, and recognise when a piece of reasoning simply doesn't hold together.

None of it depends on subject knowledge or on agreeing with the argument's conclusion — you're judging whether the logic works, not whether you like where it ends up.

Our full Critical Thinking guide covers all seven question types with real worked questions from our practice bank.

Problem Solving

Problem Solving is less about pure calculation and more about working out which piece of information in a cluttered question you actually need, which method gets you to an answer efficiently, and whether two different-looking scenarios are actually structurally the same underneath.

The maths itself stays modest by design — this module rewards clear thinking under time pressure, not advanced technique. See our Problem Solving guide for the three question types and the maths appendix in full.

Writing Task

The Writing Task gives you 40 minutes, a choice of three prompts, and a 750-word ceiling, then sends what you produce straight to every university you applied to that requires TARA — unmarked by UAT-UK, but read directly by the people making the admissions decision.

That combination of tight time, a real word limit, and an audience of actual admissions tutors makes it a different kind of task from a school essay, even before you factor in that you won't know your prompt in advance.

Our Writing Task guide covers how to choose a prompt quickly and structure an argument that holds up in 750 words or fewer.

A few practical conclusions fall out of everything above, rather than out of generic test-prep advice.

First, because Critical Thinking and Problem Solving are separately timed 40-minute, 22-question blocks rather than one mixed 90-minute sitting, practicing your pacing on genuine TARA-format material matters more than it might seem — a candidate who has only ever trained on the old TSA's 90-minute mixed format is training a different rhythm, even though the underlying question types are the same.

Second, because neither MCQ module penalises a wrong guess, the highest-value habit to build is answering every question before time runs out, rather than leaving anything blank while you agonise over a harder one earlier in the module.

Third, because the Writing Task is unmarked but read directly by admissions tutors at every university you applied to, it rewards a clear, well-structured argument within 750 words far more than it rewards eloquent but unfocused prose — treat the word limit as a real constraint to practice against, not a soft target.

Our Writing Task timing breakdown covers how to budget those 750 words across a 40-minute clock.

Beyond that, the single most useful thing you can do before October is work through enough real TARA-style questions, across all three modules, that the seven Critical Thinking types and three Problem Solving types stop feeling like an abstract list and start feeling like categories you recognise within a few seconds of reading a passage.

That's the gap between knowing the format on paper and actually being fast and accurate under exam conditions — and it's exactly what a proper timed mock routine is designed to close.

There's no substitute for actually doing this: create a free account and get started on the first module whenever you're ready.