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The Oxford TSA Guide

  • Dec 19, 2025
  • 4 min read

Updated: Jan 5

The Thinking Skills Assessment, or TSA, is an admissions test students have to take if applying for Philosophy, Politics and Economics; Economics and Management; Experimental Psychology; History and Economics; Human Sciences; or Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics. The test has two parts: a 90-minute multiple-choice aptitude test, taken by candidates for any of these six courses, and a 30-minute essay task, only taken by PPE candidates.



It's a famously challenging paper which has a great bearing on the decision of whether to invite you to interview, and so it requires significant preparation. To that end, we have created this guide to introduce you to each section, and share useful preparation tips and materials.


Student filling out multiple choice exam

Section 1


The first section comprises 50 multiple-choice questions, split between problem-solving ('reasoning using numerical skills') and critical-thinking questions ('reasoning using everyday written language'), mixed throughout the paper. The questions are roughly in order of difficulty, and so you should expect to spend longer on the second half of the paper than the first half. There are no marks deducted for incorrect answers, and so you should answer every question, even if you have to guess.


You will be given a mark out of 50, which is then converted to a TSA score, which is designed to take into account the relative difficulty of the paper. A general rule of thumb is that candidates' scores are normally distributed, with ~60 representing the average score of all applicants, and most applicants who are invited to interview scoring 70+. As such, 70+ is what you should be aiming for when you work through past papers.


On the TSA page of the Oxford website, there are past papers going back to 2008, meaning that you have a wealth of preparation materials. The best-prepared candidates will have gone through every available paper, marked their answers according to the answer key, and discussed their wrong answers with a tutor.


Also made available is a Question Guide, which takes you through each type of question you can expect, and explains answers to them.


Section 2


The second section is the writing task. As you only have thirty minutes to plan and write, it will be much shorter than essays you might write in school or at university. Nevertheless, you should approach it in a similar manner, with a thorough plan, and offering a clear answer to the question, considering and responding to the strongest counterargument as you see it.


There is no mark scheme for Section 2, making it difficult to evaluate your work, and so we recommend meeting with one of our tutors to discuss each practice essay you write once you have written them.


As PPE candidates are the only ones required to take Section 2, every question will be written with philosophy, politics, or economics in mind, and should be answerable by you, even without having studied the subject. However, in the past, other courses also took Section 2, and so you may find questions in the past papers that were not written for PPE candidates.


Test Preparation Materials


Below, we have linked all of the preparation materials available on the Oxford website. There are past papers from 2008 onwards, a specimen paper with explained answers for Section 1, and a practice test, which represents an opportunity to familiarise yourself with the online test platform.


We recommend working forwards from 2008, attempting both sections. You should take as long as you need at the start, and begin adding timed conditions for the last several papers, completing the most recent papers shortly before your test date, as they will be the most similar to your test, with the toughest questions and most challenging timing. After you complete a paper, you should mark Section 1, and then meet with a tutor to discuss the questions you struggled with, as well as to get feedback on your Section 2 essay.


You can book TSA tuition here, or get in touch if you have any questions.


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