ESAT Practice Papers: What Is Public, Where to Find It, What Is Not

Everything official for ESAT practice sits on three pages: UAT-UK’s Prepare page, its ESAT Preparation Materials page and Pearson VUE’s UAT-UK page. Between them they publish ten tests in the real test player (one specimen and one practice test for each of the five modules), five guides, one content specification and an archive of 16 older Cambridge papers with 16 answer keys (ENGAA and NSAA Section 1, 2016 to 2023). We opened every one of those links on 14 October 2026. What those pages do not list is a real past ESAT paper: the link UAT-UK labels “Archive of Past Papers” leads to the ENGAA and NSAA papers, which are older tests, not the ESAT.

UAT-UK Prepare and ESAT Preparation Materials pages and Pearson VUE’s UAT-UK page, read 14 October 2026. The 1,042 is our sum of the question counts printed on the 16 paper covers.

These are the only official questions written for the ESAT itself. UAT-UK’s Prepare page describes them: “The sample tests include question styles and formats you might see in the live test. They also closely reflect the actual testing experience. They come in two types: specimen tests and practice tests.” Pearson’s page adds that the ESAT tests “are split into their separate parts so you can easily access the subjects that you intend to take in the live test”, whereas on the day “your chosen subjects will be combined as a single test of, typically, three separately timed parts.”

Two names for the same thing. UAT-UK’s pages call the second set “practice tests”; Pearson’s page lists the same five under the heading “Sample exams”, and UAT-UK’s own note on scores speaks of “specimen and sample tests”. UCL’s page describes the pair as “specimen tests with solutions and timed practice tests”. They are all describing the same ten tests.

Which one to time: the official pages differ. UAT-UK’s ESAT page says to “answer the specimen test under timed conditions”. Its Prepare page says “We recommend you complete the practice test(s) under timed conditions”, and its FAQ says of the two tests that one “has the additional benefit of including explained answers, which can be used for revision purposes, and the other is offered under timed conditions”. We print both. Two of the three statements point the same way: learn from the specimen test, then time the practice test.

Neither test gives you a score. UAT-UK: “Although candidates are provided with feedback on correct and incorrect answers, the tests do not award a score upon completion. This is intentional because the score scale in any particular year is based on the ability distribution of the cohort, with the median fixed at 4.5 and the 90th percentile fixed at 7.0.” The Candidate Handbook says the same from the other side: “We do not publish scaled scores for practice papers as this would not be indicative of performance in any given year.” So a count of right answers is all you get, and no official table turns it into a 1 to 9 score.

The guides are teaching material with “a lot of discussion and examples as well as some exercises”, in UAT-UK’s words, and each says of itself: “This guide is not a comprehensive textbook”. They are not practice papers. There is no separate “ESAT Guide” for Mathematics 2: the link named “Mathematics 2” on the materials page opens the Notes on Mathematics, which UAT-UK wrote for TMUA Paper 1 and ESAT Mathematics 2 together.

UAT-UK’s materials page introduces the archive in two sentences: “There are also historic ENGAA Engineering Admissions Assessment (ENGAA) and Natural Sciences Admissions Assessment (NSAA) papers that contain questions of the type found in the ESAT. We have indicated in the papers where questions are not in the ESAT specification.” These are older admissions assessments from Cambridge’s exam board: the covers carry the copyright of UCLES and, by 2023, Cambridge University Press & Assessment. The papers in the archive are dated 2016 to 2023 and each cover says “This paper is Section 1 of 2”. Only Section 1 is in the archive.

Three things about the archive are easy to miss. First, the answer keys are letters only: the page lists a “Question Paper” and an “Answer Key” for each year and nothing else, so there are no worked solutions. (UAT-UK’s TMUA archive, by contrast, lists “worked answers” for every paper.) Second, the “not in the ESAT specification” marking is a cross through the question number, and in the papers we went through it appears in one part only: Part B of every ENGAA paper and Part E of the 2016 to 2019 NSAA papers, both titled “Advanced Mathematics and Advanced Physics”. Third, the ENGAA and NSAA of the same year share many questions, so sixteen papers are fewer than sixteen papers’ worth of fresh practice. The module-by-module guide in this series sets out which part to use for which module and counts the crossed questions.

On the first row, be precise about what is and is not official. UAT-UK does not print the sentence “we do not publish past ESAT papers”. What we can say is that its pages list none, that the link it calls “Archive of Past Papers” opens the ENGAA and NSAA archive, and that it prohibits sharing live test content. UAT-UK’s About page says the ESAT was “offered for the first time in October 2024”, so 2027 entry is its third admissions cycle (our count), and its technical report for 2025-26 notes that “Multiple forms (versions) of the ESAT modules were used, and these were administered at different times to different regions.” In that cycle, at least, there was no single ESAT paper per sitting. Anything sold or shared as a “real ESAT past paper” is therefore either not real or shared against UAT-UK’s rules, and UAT-UK warns that candidates “may inadvertently disadvantage their own application(s) by engaging in this practice.”

Oxford Physics is the only one that mentions an older test of its own, and it is careful about it: “the syllabus and difficulty level of the October 2026 ESAT will be different from those of the previously used Physics Aptitude Test (PAT)”, and PAT resources are described as ones you “may find … useful if preparing for interviews at Oxford.” Cambridge’s ESAT page does not mention the ENGAA or NSAA at all; the archive is on UAT-UK’s site only.