TSA exam preparation

Hello, Ael here! Yesterday I took the example test available on Oxford’s website for the Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA) year 2022, and today I did the 2021 variant. I scored a 29 yesterday and a 31 today, which puts me at around the ~63-66 point mark.

After reviewing my scores, I see that my biggest weaknesses seem to be in calculations and statistics, and some reasoning surrounding assumptions/principles/conclusions. While I could go at improving the last three mentioned, a higher score gain will probably be acquired if I go about making my mental mathematics, and knowledge about charts and statistics better. For example, one very obvious blunder I did was on this question:

I answered B since I saw the bar physically increase, failing to take note of the fact that the bar in fact shows number of people, and we are looking at percentages, which would make C true instead. This might just have been a case of fatigue due to being at question #38 at this point, and this test is kind of like a marathon. I will make a mental note of questions like this in the future though.

As for the mental calculations, I think my best bet is to just do more TSA practice questions, and redoing the ones I failed. Maybe solidifying the type of mental calculations that I find the hardest, such as multiplying random fractions and approximating them is the way to go. The biggest challenge I am facing is that we get approx 1.8 minutes per question, which kind of rushes one ahead. One strategy I might try is that if I cannot immediately solve a question, I’ll set it aside and get back to it later when I have lots of time left after having finished the question types I am comfortable with.

I will share any progress that I make.

Thank you all for reading!

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