ESAT Chemistry: all 17 official topics, and where the marks actually go

Four universities use the ESAT: Imperial College London, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford and UCL. Chemistry appears in two different roles, either named by the course or offered as one of a free choice of two.

The UCL requirement is new: it applies from September 2027 entry (or September 2028 deferred entry), and it is three modules in total.

Oxford's other ESAT courses (Engineering Science, Biomedical Engineering, Chemical, Civil, Electrical, Information and Mechanical Engineering, Physics, and Physics and Philosophy) all specify Mathematics 1, Mathematics 2 and Physics, so Chemistry never enters the picture there. The same is true of Cambridge Engineering (H100).

One warning about a page you may land on. Imperial's ESAT page lists Durham, LSE and Warwick under "ESAT for other universities", but in UAT-UK's own Course List for 2027 entry every course at those three is TMUA and none is ESAT. Go by UAT-UK's four.

Two rules to settle before you book. Modules are picked at booking and cannot be changed without cancelling and re-booking. And if you are applying to two or more courses that require the ESAT, where one gives a free choice of modules and another lists compulsory ones, your selection must be dictated by the course with the compulsory list. Register for the wrong set and your application to that course may be invalid.

The appendix of the specification lists the Chemistry content as seventeen numbered topics, C1 to C17:

That is the whole structure. No parent categories, no weighting, and not one sentence anywhere saying which topics carry more questions. The familiar physical, inorganic and organic split is a teaching habit rather than anything the specification says, and the practical consequence of revising by it is that separation techniques, chemical tests, and air and water have nowhere to live and get quietly dropped.

One more thing worth holding on to. The specification puts the detailed statements under each topic in Appendix 1, and the current version is stated as being for assessment in October 2026 and January 2027. Your revision checklist should be copied line by line from those pages, not from any third party summary, this one included.

Since the specification does not group anything, you need a grouping of your own just to sequence revision. What follows is our teaching habit, useful for spotting gaps, and it is not the official structure. Questions in the test will not announce which group they belong to.

Use it mechanically. Draw the seventeen topics as a table under those five headings and strike each one off as you cover it. Once all five are struck through, throw the table away. The thing worth keeping is the original list in Appendix 1.

The rule is blunt: no calculator and no dictionary. The centre provides erasable materials for working out. The official pages describe them variously as an erasable booklet, an erasable notebook and pen, and a whiteboard and pen, so the exact object is not pinned down; what is consistent is that the centre supplies it and you can raise your hand for a replacement during the test.

That turns C4 from a question of whether you know the relationship into a question of whether you can push the numbers through by hand. Moles and mass, concentration and volume, gas volumes, limiting reagents, yield, empirical formulae: none of the relationships are difficult on paper. The difficulty is which arithmetic route you take.

Five things actually worth practising:

One test of whether you are practising the right thing: if a calculator is within reach while you work through quantitative questions, you are not practising ESAT C4. Put it away from day one.

The specification states that all modules assume knowledge of the content of Mathematics 1. For this module specifically, the questions draw on the C topics together with the M topics. The MM topics that belong to Mathematics 2 do not come into Chemistry.

The seven Mathematics 1 topics are units, number, ratio and proportion, algebra, geometry, statistics and probability. In chemistry questions, it is the first four you use constantly.

There are two consequences. The good one is that Mathematics 1 is compulsory anyway, so time spent on those four topics counts twice and is the best value work available anywhere in the ESAT. The bad one is that weakness in Mathematics 1 never announces itself as a maths error. It arrives on your list of mistakes looking like a chemistry error, you conclude you need to revise more content, and the real gap stays open.

A quick diagnostic: redo the quantitative questions you got wrong, this time with a calculator. If they all come out right the moment the arithmetic is handled for you, the problem is Mathematics 1, not Chemistry.

Each module is forty minutes and twenty-seven multiple choice questions, which works out at roughly eighty-nine seconds each. Each module is separately timed, time saved on one does not carry over to the next, and there are no breaks between modules. For most candidates the whole test runs to a hundred and twenty minutes, and Chemistry is one stretch inside it.

The marking is just as simple. One mark per correct answer, nothing deducted for a wrong one, and each module reported separately. The official position is explicit: because nothing is deducted, it is worth attempting every question.

Put those two facts together and the conclusion is uncomfortable but firm. A quantitative question that takes three steps of hand arithmetic is worth exactly what a recall question on chemical tests is worth. Spend four minutes on the first and you have traded three questions for one.

The workable pattern is two passes. On the first pass, go straight through and answer everything you can settle inside a minute, flagging anything that visibly needs a long calculation, and never fight a question. On the second pass, come back to the flagged ones knowing exactly how many minutes and how many questions are left, and choose which ones deserve the working. Keep the last fifteen seconds to fill in anything still blank with your best reading of it, because a blank has an expected value of zero and a guess does not.

This has to become automatic before the day. That means timed forty minute runs rather than loose question practice. You will not acquire triage instincts on the morning of the test; you will only execute whatever you drilled.

These four have something in common. They involve almost no arithmetic, they reward completeness of recall, and in most curricula they turn up early and are never revisited on their own. Candidates therefore file them under "already know that", which by the time of the test is no longer true.

Worth adding C15, kinetic and particle theory. It gets skipped as assumed knowledge, but it is the language in which rates of reaction and changes of state are explained, and skipping it downgrades your qualitative work in C10 from confident to approximate.

The detailed statements for all of these sit in Appendix 1 of the specification. Go through those pages line by line before you start revising and write out separately anything you have never met. It takes under an hour and pays better than another set of calculations.

The official title of C2 carries the convention in brackets: IUPAC conventions, Groups are labelled as 1-18. Specifications rarely legislate notation, so when one does, it is telling you the notation will appear in the questions.

That table is ordinary chemical notation rather than anything the specification supplies. All the specification does is fix the numbering as IUPAC's 1 to 18; it prints no conversion table of its own.

Two places bite. The first is the noble gases, which older UK material calls Group 0 and many textbooks elsewhere label 0 as well, while the specification writes Group 18. Same elements, but converting between them at eighty-nine seconds a question is pure waste. The second is Group 8. Under IUPAC that is the family iron belongs to, whereas in several older schemes a label containing VIII could mean the iron, cobalt and nickel triads, or, in the American convention, VIIIA could mean the noble gases. When Group 8 appears on screen you want exactly one reaction, and it should be the IUPAC one.

The fix is not to memorise a conversion table. It is to redraw the periodic table numbered 1 to 18 during revision and then attach every property, trend and reaction you learn to the new numbers directly. A conversion table is a transitional aid; two weeks out from the test you should no longer be reaching for it.

You get one score for each module you sit, on a scale from 1 (low) to 9 (high) reported to one decimal place. There is no combined total, so your Chemistry score is simply your Chemistry score. Each ESAT module is equated and scaled separately, which is how results from different versions and different sittings are placed on a single scale.

On the question everyone actually wants answered, the official position is unambiguous: there is no pass or fail score for the ESAT, and scores are used alongside the other information in your application. UAT-UK does not publish grade boundaries. So there is no official basis for any claim about what Chemistry score is safe or competitive, and this page will not invent one. What you can rely on is only this: a number between 1 and 9, to one decimal place, reported module by module.

One university has published anything at this level of detail. Imperial's public dashboard reports scores and outcomes for 2025-entry applicants department by department, and the department that matters here is Chemical Engineering, where the mean mark among offer-holders was 14.2 overall and 15.4 among Overseas applicants. Four things have to be read alongside those figures. The dashboard reports a raw mark out of 27, meaning questions answered correctly, not the 1 to 9 scaled score. The page does not say whether that is the mark on a single module or an average across the modules a candidate sat. The data is historic. And Imperial states on the same page that a high score does not necessarily mean a place, that a low score does not mean an unsuccessful application, and that there are no grade boundaries or pass marks for the ESAT. It gives you a sense of scale, not a target.

Results arrive approximately four weeks after the sitting. For 2027 entry the dates are 16 November 2026 for the October sitting and 8 February 2027 for the January one. They are matched course by course against your UCAS application and sent automatically to the institutions whose courses require the test; candidates cannot choose who sees them, and appeals against scores are not accepted.

Translated into revision terms: you cannot set yourself a target in the form of a boundary. You can only measure readiness by whether any of the seventeen topics are still unrevised and how reliable your calculator free quantitative work has become.

There are two test windows for 2027 entry: 12 to 16 October 2026, and 4 to 8 January 2027. Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau have fixed days within those windows, with the ESAT running on 12 or 13 October and on 6 January. The official explanation is that following reports in October 2024 of candidates attempting to obtain and sell test content without authorisation, the test is now offered on only two days in October and one in January in those territories.

Booking, in UK time: the October window opens 20 July 2026 at 15.00 and closes 28 September 2026 at 18.00; the January window opens 26 October 2026 at 15.00 and closes 21 December 2026 at 18.00. Account creation, access arrangements and bursary applications for 2027 entry open on 1 June 2026 at 15.00. Fees are £78 in the UK and the Republic of Ireland and £133 elsewhere, set by the location of your test centre rather than your nationality or home.

Two deadlines fall earlier than booking closes and need their own diary entries. Access arrangements close on 14 September 2026 at 18.00 for the October sitting and 7 December 2026 at 18.00 for January; bursary applications close on 21 September 2026 at 18.00 and 14 December 2026 at 18.00 respectively. If you need either, count backwards from those dates rather than from the booking deadline.

You may sit each test only once per admission cycle, and the October 2026 and January 2027 sittings both belong to the 2027 cycle; registering twice, including under a second account, is treated as misconduct. Applicants to Cambridge or Oxford whose course requires the test will normally be required to sit in October, the exceptions being mature applicants to a Cambridge mature college with a January deadline and applicants to Oxford's Astrophoria Foundation Year. Applicants to other institutions can choose their sitting, and the official line is that there is no advantage either way.

A Chemistry timetable worked backwards from the date:

On the day itself, plan to arrive thirty minutes before your appointment. Arrive more than fifteen minutes late and you may be refused entry with your fee forfeited, which is not a risk worth carrying.

Two things to state plainly. We are an independent preparation platform with no affiliation to, authorisation from, or partnership with UAT-UK, Pearson or any university. UAT-UK states that it does not endorse commercial preparation services and that all necessary preparatory materials are available free of charge to all candidates, so the official materials should be your primary source. And sharing or discussing test content after the event is expressly prohibited, which means any channel offering you "the real questions" is offering you a rule breach.