The TMUA in January: a ten week plan
Ten weeks is enough to prepare well if most of it is spent answering questions under time. This plan splits them into three phases: the content, then timing, then full papers, with the free material for each.
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The January sitting
The January sitting runs from Monday 4 to Friday 8 January 2027, and bookings open on Monday 26 October 2026 with UAT-UK, which runs the test (esat-tmua.ac.uk). Your universities may set their own booking deadline, so check each one, and book before you start week 1. Results come in your UAT-UK account about four weeks after the test.
Who January is for. Cambridge and Oxford applicants sit in October, so January is mostly for candidates applying elsewhere; check what each of your courses accepts on its own admissions page.
Weeks 1 to 4: the content
Work through the methods, and answer questions in short sets, reading the worked solution after each one.
- Week 1. Read what the TMUA is: two papers, the first applying mathematics and the second about mathematical reasoning. Then sit one paper untimed in TMUA practice, free to start, and note which questions you could not begin.
- Weeks 2 and 3. Our TMUA methods, one at a time: read the method, then answer questions that use it. The pure mathematics the TMUA asks for overlaps the ESAT's, so the ESAT Mathematics 2 questions are useful extra practice, each worked in full.
- Week 4. Paper 2's reasoning: necessary and sufficient conditions, what a counterexample shows, and where a proof goes wrong. Read the worked solution of every reasoning question you answer, right or wrong.
Done when you can start every question, even the ones you cannot finish.
Weeks 5 to 8: timing
Sit one paper at a time under timed conditions, then reread only the questions that cost you marks.
- The pace. Each paper is twenty questions in seventy five minutes. Timed Paper 1 and Paper 2 are in TMUA practice, marked, with every solution afterwards.
- Two timed papers a week, one of each, so neither paper's style goes cold.
- Keep a list of mistakes, not of topics. For each question that cost you marks, write the sentence that went wrong, and the method that would have saved the time.
Done when you finish a paper inside the time without guessing the last few questions.
Weeks 9 and 10: full papers
Full timed papers: Paper 1 and Paper 2 back to back, as on the day, and rest the day before.
- Two or three full sittings. Both papers in one session, marked, then reread only the questions that cost you marks.
- Nothing new. Go back over your list of mistakes and the methods you use most.
- The day before. Rest. Check your booking, your test centre and the ID you will bring, in the name you booked with.
If you are behind
Starting late? Do not try to catch up on the weeks you missed. Find the phase whose end date is still ahead of you, start there, and shorten the content weeks rather than the timed ones: time under the clock is the part that cannot be crammed.