How to prepare for the TMUA
A realistic preparation plan built around the eighteen official past papers: what to do first, how to review mistakes, and when to start sitting papers under timed conditions.
There are eighteen official past papers. That is the entire resource, and it is free. Almost everything that matters about preparing for the TMUA is a question of how you use them rather than what else you buy.
Week one: find out where you actually are
Sit one full paper, untimed, before revising anything. It will be uncomfortable and the score will not be flattering. Do it anyway — you cannot plan around a gap you have not measured, and the untimed score separates “I do not know this” from “I could not do it fast enough”, which need completely different fixes.
Do a Paper 1 and a Paper 2 separately. Most people find a real gap between the two, and which way it falls decides where your time goes.
The middle stretch: review harder than you practise
The most common mistake is doing paper after paper and only checking the score. The marks come from the review, not the attempt. For every question you got wrong:
- Work out whether you did not know the technique, misread the question, or ran out of time. These are three different problems.
- Read the official worked solution properly — including for questions you got right by guessing. A right answer for the wrong reason will not repeat under pressure.
- Note the ones where the solution used something you would never have thought of. Those are the patterns worth collecting.
Reviewing one paper thoroughly beats sitting three and glancing at the answers. If you are short of time, cut the number of papers, not the review.
Treat the two papers differently
Paper 1 improves mainly with volume — the more problems you see, the faster you recognise what a question wants. Paper 2 usually does not improve with volume alone, because the difficulty is in reasoning rather than recall.
For Paper 2, work slowly at first and write down why the answer is right before checking. If your reasoning was wrong but the answer was right, mark it as wrong. The two papers are covered in more depth here.
The last month: add the clock
Only once the content is solid should you start sitting papers under full 75-minute conditions. Time pressure practised too early just teaches you to rush questions you do not yet understand.
In timed papers, practise the mechanics as well as the mathematics: skipping decisively when a question is not landing, and leaving the last minute to fill in every blank. With no negative marking, an unanswered question is a wasted one — see how the scoring works.
Save some papers
Keep two or three papers untouched for the final fortnight. Once you have seen a paper, its value as a timed rehearsal is gone, and going into the real test without a recent clean run is unnecessarily unnerving.
A workable plan
- Sit one Paper 1 and one Paper 2 untimed. Record raw marks out of 20.
- Work through papers in order, reviewing every wrong answer properly.
- Spend extra time on whichever paper your baseline was weaker on.
- Move to timed conditions about four weeks out.
- Keep two full sittings back for the final two weeks.
Every paper is free here. If you would rather not print, time and mark them yourself — and avoid the worked-solutions PDF spoiling neighbouring answers — QED sits them for you online, marks instantly, and shows the solution for one question at a time.