TARA vs TSA vs BMAT: comparing the UK's university admissions tests

If you've landed here searching for TSA past papers, BMAT registration dates, or a straight comparison of "Oxford's admissions tests," the short version is this:

TARA is the only one of the three still running. TSA (the Thinking Skills Assessment) and BMAT (the Biomedical Admissions Test) have both been discontinued, and a lot of content about them online was written before that happened and simply hasn't been updated.

TARA (the Test for Admission:

Reasoning and Analysis) is the reasoning test Oxford and UCL now use for a specific set of courses from the 2026/27 admissions cycle onward.

TSA was its direct predecessor at Oxford and shares an unusually large amount of DNA with it — same question-type taxonomy, different administration.

BMAT sits in a different category altogether: it was a medicine-specific test, not a general reasoning test like TSA or TARA, and its discontinuation is a separate story that happened on a separate timeline.

We'll take each in turn, then zoom out to the other Oxford admissions tests that changed at the same time, because if you're trying to work out "what happened to Oxford's old admissions tests," TSA and BMAT are only part of that picture.

A high-level comparison. Full detail, including the sourcing caveats that apply to some of these figures, follows in the sections below — read those before treating any single cell here as the final word.

Here's how that breaks down:

TARA stands for Test for Admission:

Reasoning and Analysis. It's administered by UAT-UK and, from the 2026/27 admissions cycle, is the test Oxford and UCL use for a defined set of courses.

It has three separately timed modules, taken in order with no going back once you move on:

Critical Thinking (22 multiple-choice questions, 40 minutes), Problem Solving (22 multiple-choice questions, 40 minutes), and a Writing Task (one prompt chosen from a set of three, 40 minutes, maximum 750 words).

Neither multiple-choice module carries negative marking, so every question is worth attempting. Calculators and dictionaries aren't allowed in any part of the test.

If you want to get a feel for the pacing before test day, you can start working through the practice bank free.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving are scored separately on a 1.0-to-9.0 scale, to one decimal place. UAT-UK has stated that the scale is designed so a typical candidate scores around 4.5, with roughly the top 10% of candidates scoring above 7.0.

The Writing Task isn't marked by UAT-UK at all; a copy simply goes to every university the candidate applied to, for admissions tutors to read directly.

If you've already sat TARA and want to know what those two separate numbers actually mean for your application, our results explained guide walks through UAT-UK's published score distributions in full.

At Oxford, Oxford's own admissions tests page confirms seven courses currently require TARA:

Economics and Management; History and Economics; History and Politics; Human Sciences; Philosophy, Politics and Economics; Psychology (Experimental); and Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics — the full list, with what each course actually expects from you, is in our Oxford-specific TARA guide.

Oxford candidates sit TARA only in the October 2026 window, with no January alternative, a constraint we cover in more depth in our guide to Oxford's one-sitting rule.

At UCL, eleven courses require it, spanning both social sciences and engineering and computing — it's not a humanities-only test there the way it is at Oxford, as UCL's own tests, tasks and interviews page sets out (our full UCL course list breaks all eleven down).

UCL candidates can choose between the October 2026 sitting and a January 2027 sitting, and UCL's Mechanical Engineering listing specifically flags TARA as a new requirement for this cycle.

Fees are currently confirmed at £78 for UK and Republic of Ireland candidates and £133 for international candidates, per UAT-UK's own registration page — fees can still change between cycles, so treat that page as the live number rather than this one.

Bursary vouchers are available for UK candidates in financial need, covering the fee in full; our dates and registration guide has the bursary application window laid out alongside the full 2026/27 timeline.

For the full breakdown of dates, fees and course lists, see our complete TARA guide.

The Thinking Skills Assessment, or TSA, was published by Cambridge Assessment Admissions Testing (part of the University of Cambridge).

Oxford used it for many years, across a similar spread of courses to those that now require TARA, before it was discontinued after use through the 2025 sitting.

Cambridge Assessment's own notice announcing the closure of its admissions testing operation confirms it stopped delivering TSA directly, though its wording on exactly what replaced it is genuinely vague — for the clearer picture of TSA being superseded by TARA for 2026/27 entry at both Oxford and UCL, Oxford's own admissions guidance is the better source.

The relationship between TSA and TARA is closer than most testing transitions.

TSA used the exact same seven named Critical Thinking question types and the same three named Problem Solving question types that TARA uses now (our module-by-module breakdown covers all ten in one place), built on a near-identical maths appendix and a very similar worked-example teaching style.

That's a directly verified structural match, not a guess — if you already have TSA preparation materials, the underlying skills they teach are still exactly what TARA tests.

Register free and you can check that for yourself against a real TARA question rather than taking our word for it.

Where the two tests genuinely part ways is administration, and this is worth being precise about rather than glossing over.

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

TARA instead splits those same skills into two separate 40-minute, 22-question modules, taken one after the other with no mixing between them.

So the question-type taxonomy carried across almost exactly; the timing, the mixing of question types, and the module structure did not.

The Oxford variant of TSA also added an optional 30-minute writing task with a choice of four prompts for most courses, where TARA's Writing Task offers a choice of three.

If you want the full side-by-side breakdown — question type by question type, with what to expect differently on test day — that's covered in detail in our TSA vs TARA guide.

It's the more useful read if TSA is the test you're actually trying to understand; this page is meant to place TSA in the wider picture rather than replace that dedicated comparison.

It's worth being upfront about something a lot of "TARA vs TSA vs BMAT" content glosses over:

BMAT was never testing the same thing as TSA or TARA. TSA and TARA are general reasoning tests — they don't assume subject knowledge and are used across humanities, social science, and some STEM courses.

BMAT (the Biomedical Admissions Test) was a medicine and biomedical-sciences-specific test, combining an aptitude and skills section with a section testing scientific knowledge directly, plus a written response task of its own — a different exercise from TARA's own Writing Task, but the same underlying idea of admissions tutors reading a real applicant's writing directly.

Grouping the three together as if they measured the same thing would misrepresent all three, so treat this as two separate stories that happen to share a chapter in Oxford's testing history, rather than one continuous test lineage.

BMAT's final sitting was in autumn 2023, after which Cambridge Assessment Admissions Testing — the same organisation that published TSA — stopped producing new BMAT papers.

The seven universities that had used it for medicine and related admissions — Imperial College London, Oxford, Cambridge, Lancaster, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UCL, and Leeds — all moved to the UCAT (University Clinical Aptitude Test) for applicants from 2025 entry onward.

If you're applying for medicine now, UCAT is the test to prepare for at every one of those universities; BMAT preparation materials, unlike TSA's, don't carry over in any useful sense, since the two tests measure different things by design.

(If TARA, rather than UCAT, is the test you're actually trying to sort out, our TARA FAQ is a faster read than this comparison.)

TSA's replacement by TARA wasn't an isolated change.

Oxford discontinued eight of its own in-house admissions tests for 2027 entry — meaning the change took effect from the 2026 sitting onward — as part of a broader move to a shared testing partnership called UAT-UK, which UCL also joined in 2025.

For the fuller story of how TSA's own background feeds into TARA specifically, see our complete guide's section on TSA's background.

If you're trying to work out what happened to a specific Oxford test you sat, or one your school used to prepare students for, here's the full list of what changed:

Two Oxford admissions tests were left untouched by all of this:

UCAT for medicine and LNAT for law continue unchanged.

And BMAT's move to UCAT, described above, happened on its own separate timeline driven by Cambridge Assessment Admissions Testing's decision to stop producing it, rather than as part of Oxford's UAT-UK-linked overhaul — the two changes landed in roughly the same few years but for different reasons.

If TMUA or ESAT is the test you're actually here for, worth knowing:

GhostPrep also has dedicated practice question banks for both, built the same way as our TARA material — register free and you'll be able to switch to whichever bank matches the course you're applying for.

Because this page leans on facts that shift as testing bodies make policy changes, it's worth separating what's firmly verified from what isn't, rather than presenting everything with the same false confidence.

TARA's own format, scoring, and the Oxford and UCL course lists above come from UAT-UK's published specification documents and from ox.ac.uk and ucl.ac.uk directly — those are primary sources, checked on 16 July 2026, and the same care about not overclaiming applies to how we talk about your own score in our results explained guide.

The structural comparison between TSA and TARA — the shared question-type taxonomy, the different administration format — comes directly from Cambridge Assessment Admissions Testing's own TSA question guide, also a primary source.

The exact "last sitting year" figures for both TSA and BMAT, and the detail of Oxford's eight discontinued tests, come from a secondary source rather than something we've independently verified against each testing body's own archived pages.

They're reasonably well sourced and internally consistent, but we'd rather flag that distinction plainly than imply a level of certainty the sourcing doesn't quite support.

If a specific date here matters for a decision you're making — say, whether an old TSA or BMAT past paper is still worth your time — it's worth a direct check against the relevant university's current admissions page before you rely on it.

For TARA's own dates specifically — the ones we have the most confidence in — see our full 2026/27 timeline.

One more thing worth flagging while we're being candid about sourcing:

UCL's general registration window for TARA (20 July–21 September for the October sitting) doesn't fully reconcile with Oxford's own booking deadline of 28 September found directly on ox.ac.uk.

Both figures come from sources we trust, they just don't quite agree with each other — we dig into that exact conflict, and what to do about it, in our dates and registration guide.

Confirm the exact live deadline for your specific university at registration time rather than assuming either number is definitive.

If you're applying to Oxford or UCL for 2026/27 entry to one of the courses listed above, TARA is the test in front of you — TSA is not something you can sit instead, and BMAT was never an alternative to it in the first place.

Our course-specific guides cover how to actually prepare once you know that:

Oxford's one-sitting prep strategy if you're applying there, or UCL's guide if you're weighing the October-versus-January choice.

If you're applying for medicine at any of the seven universities that used to require BMAT, UCAT is what you need to prepare for.

If your course requires the Mathematics Admissions Test's successor, that's TMUA; if it requires the old Physics or Biomedical Sciences Admissions Test's successor, that's ESAT.

And if you're applying to a course from the four Oxford tests that were dropped with no replacement, there's no dedicated admissions test at all for that route any more — your application rests on the rest of your UCAS submission instead.

Whichever of these applies to you, checking your specific course's current admissions page directly is still the right final step.

Testing requirements can and do change between cycles, and a page like this one, however carefully sourced, is a starting point for orientation rather than a substitute for the university's own live requirements.