HPAT and UCAT To Succeed: Two New Guides for Third-Level Entry Tests
The Irish Exam Guides series has covered Junior Cycle and Leaving Cert since it launched. The gap was the step after that: the aptitude tests that decide entry to medicine and the health professions, sat by students who have spent six years being taught how to prepare for a syllabus and are suddenly facing a test that does not have one.
HPAT and UCAT To Succeed close that gap. Both sit in a new Third-Level Entry Tests subcategory, taking the series to 13 books.
HPAT To Succeed (125 pages)
The Health Professions Admission Test is required for entry to undergraduate medicine in Ireland, and it is the single most misunderstood component of the CAO process. Most of the misunderstanding is about what it is for. It is not a knowledge test and it cannot be crammed for in the way a Leaving Cert subject can — but it can absolutely be prepared for, and students who prepare properly do better than students who walk in cold.
The book covers all three sections — Logical Reasoning and Problem Solving, Interpersonal Understanding, and Non-Verbal Reasoning — with the method, the common traps and the timing strategy for each. It includes 54 original practice questions, 18 per section across three practice sets, and a full 114-question mock exam matching the real test's three-section structure and length, with an explanation for every single question.
It also explains the exact weighted scoring formula and how the HPAT result combines with CAO points, which is the part students most often get wrong when deciding how much preparation is worth doing.
UCAT To Succeed (141 pages)
The University Clinical Aptitude Test is the equivalent step for UK medical and dental schools, and it is a longer, faster and more time-pressured test than the HPAT.
The book covers all four current subtests — Verbal Reasoning, Decision Making, Quantitative Reasoning and Situational Judgement. Note the word current: Abstract Reasoning was removed from the UCAT entirely from the 2025 cycle, and there is a great deal of preparation material still in circulation that has not caught up with that. This book covers the test as it is now sat.
There are 60 original practice questions and a full 184-question mock exam — 244 original questions in total — timed to the real per-section limits of 22, 37, 26 and 26 minutes, because practising these subtests without the clock is practising a different test. The 900 to 2700 scoring scale and the separately banded Situational Judgement result are both explained, along with an in-person test-centre exam-day walkthrough.
The Questions Are Ours
Every practice question and every mock exam question in both books is original. None is a reproduction of a real ACER or UCAT item. That is partly a rights question and partly a quality one: reproduced questions age badly, and a question written to teach a method is more useful than a question copied because it once appeared.
Both books include 4, 8 and 12-week study schedules, and both walk through the exam-day experience in detail — remote proctored for the HPAT, in person at a test centre for the UCAT. Test dates, fees and registration windows change every cycle, so both books tell you to verify those against the official test provider rather than trusting a printed page.