What Aptitude Tests Actually Measure, and Whether You Can Prepare for Them
Aptitude tests occupy an odd position in the Irish and British admissions systems. Students spend six years learning how to prepare for a syllabus, then meet a test that does not have one. The two obvious first questions, what is this measuring and can I do anything about it, have more contested answers than most preparation material admits.
This post covers what the HPAT and the UCAT contain, how each is scored, and what the evidence and the administrators say about preparation. On that last point we will report a disagreement rather than pretend to settle it.
The HPAT: What Is In It
The Health Professions Admission Test is required for entry to undergraduate medicine at all six Irish medical schools, and for two UL health-profession masters programmes. It is developed by ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research, and sat online under remote proctoring.
By ACER's own description it is a two-and-a-half-hour computer-based assessment of 114 multiple-choice questions across three separately timed sections:
- Logical Reasoning and Problem Solving, which involves comprehending and analysing information in order to formulate a solution or a plausible hypothesis.
- Interpersonal Understanding, which assesses the ability to identify, understand and infer the thoughts, feelings, behaviour and intent of others.
- Non-Verbal Reasoning, which assesses the ability to reason in the abstract and solve problems in non-verbal contexts.
Applicants to those two UL masters programmes also sit an additional one-hour Written English component; nobody else does.
How the HPAT Is Scored
Each of the three section scores is reported on a scale of 0 to 100, and ACER is explicit that these are not percentage marks. Candidates receive a score for each section, an overall score, and an overall percentile ranking against everyone who sat the test in the same year.
All questions carry the same value and there is no deduction for a wrong answer, so leaving a question blank is strictly worse than guessing. ACER's own guidance is to attempt as many questions as possible.
The three sections do not contribute equally to the overall score. A 40/40/20 split in favour of the first two is very widely quoted and is consistent with how the test is generally discussed, but it is not stated on ACER's public summary pages. Treat the principle as reliable and the figures as something to confirm in the current information booklet.
The UCAT: Four Subtests, Just Under Two Hours
The University Clinical Aptitude Test is used by a consortium of UK and partner universities for medical and dental admissions, and is sat at Pearson test centres. The standard test runs just under two hours across four separately timed subtests:
- Verbal Reasoning, 44 questions in 22 minutes, drawn from eleven passages with four questions each.
- Decision Making, 35 questions in 37 minutes.
- Quantitative Reasoning, 36 questions in 26 minutes.
- Situational Judgement, 69 questions in 26 minutes.
Note that there are four subtests, not five. Abstract Reasoning was removed from the 2025 cycle onwards, on the stated grounds of lower predictive validity and greater coachability. A great deal of preparation material in circulation has not caught up, which is a quick test of whether a resource has been revised recently.
How the UCAT Is Scored
The three cognitive subtests are each scaled from 300 to 900, giving a total between 900 and 2700. Situational Judgement is reported separately in bands 1 to 4, with band 1 the highest. There is no negative marking here either.
Two details are routinely missed. Raw marks are converted to scaled scores because the subtests contain different numbers of questions, so raw totals cannot be compared across them. And in Decision Making, multiple-statement questions are worth two marks, with one mark for a partially correct response, which makes a partial attempt worth having under time pressure.
What the Test Administrators Say About Coaching
ACER's stated view is that there is little benefit in last-minute cramming, but that some familiarity with the question types typically presented is beneficial, and that wide and critical reading may help for the first two sections. On commercial courses its language is pointed: they are not recommended, authorised by, or associated with ACER, they are unregulated, and it is for the candidate to judge whether any can supply objective evidence that participation improves scores enough to justify the cost.
The UCAT Consortium, with the Medical Schools Council and the Dental Schools Council, goes further, describing paid-for preparation resources as unnecessary and unregulated and stating that they do not automatically equate to better performance. It advises scepticism about coaching claims and notes that commercial questions may not match the standard of real items, may not reproduce the on-screen interface, and may not model the scoring accurately.
What the Published Evidence Says
Here is the honest position: the research does not line up behind either the marketing or the official scepticism.
A national study of UCAT candidates published in BMC Medical Education in 2022 found that use of the free official practice tests, use of paid commercial materials, attendance at school-based preparation and simply spending longer preparing were all significantly associated with higher scores. The same study found something uncomfortable: candidates from less deprived backgrounds, and those at independent or grammar schools, were significantly more likely to use paid materials and to prepare for longer. An association in that data cannot separate the effect of preparation from the effect of advantage.
Pulling the other way, research by Griffin and colleagues on Australian medical selection testing found the effect of commercial coaching on test performance to be relatively small, and a related study by that group reported that coached students went on to perform less well through the medical course itself. Objective evidence that coaching substantially moves scores is thin, even though most students who take such courses believe it helped them.
These positions are not fully reconcilable on current evidence, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What can be said with confidence is narrower: familiarity with format, question types and timing is useful and cheap, and the marginal value of spending large sums beyond that is not established.
What We Would Actually Do
Work through the official free materials first, practise under the real clock, and verify dates, fees and format with the provider every cycle.
HPAT To Succeed and UCAT To Succeed sit in the Third-Level Entry Tests section of the Irish Exam Guides series, covering the method, timing and scoring of each test, with original practice questions and full-length mock exams written to teach the question types rather than reproduce real ones.