TARA Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking is one of the TARA's three modules, and every candidate sits all three. The module gives you 22 multiple-choice questions in 40 minutes, and the clock is ring-fenced: the three modules are separately timed, so a module's unused minutes do not carry into the next one.

The test is computer-based. You are given an erasable booklet for working, and calculators and dictionaries may not be used. No subject-specific knowledge is required, and everything needed to answer a question sits in the passage in front of you. That is precisely why outside knowledge is a liability here rather than an advantage: the better you know the topic, the more carefully you have to guard against importing a fact the passage never stated.

Scoring is straightforward. UAT-UK reports Critical Thinking and Problem Solving as two separate scores. UAT-UK states on its TARA page: "They score on a scale from 1 (low) to 9 (high), with results reported to one decimal place." Each question is worth one mark, no marks are deducted for a wrong answer, and there is no pass or fail mark.

Two things follow, and both matter more than they sound. First, since nothing is deducted, an unanswered question is strictly worse than a guessed one. Second, and this is where you should be sceptical of anything you read elsewhere: UAT-UK has never published a score distribution, a percentile table or a cut-off for the TARA. Anyone telling you that a particular Critical Thinking score is "competitive" has invented it. The sensible target is not a number but a habit: consistently getting the argument's structure right in the time available.

UAT-UK's Question Guide states: "In the TARA there are seven types of Critical Thinking question based on these skills." The first four all test the same underlying thing: how carefully you can read the skeleton of an argument.

Treat these seven as a checklist of skills to practise, not labels to assign under time pressure. In the exam nobody asks you to name the type.

Forty minutes for 22 questions is 1 minute 49 seconds per question, and reading the passage, weighing the options and committing to an answer all have to fit inside that. Treat the module as roughly 35 minutes of work plus a 5-minute buffer, and rehearse that split rather than discovering it on the day.

The workable approach is two passes. On the first pass, answer everything you can settle cleanly, and the moment a question stops moving, put an answer down anyway, note its number in your erasable booklet, and go on. Time spent on question 9 is taken directly from question 20, which may well be easier. On the second pass you go back to the numbers in your booklet with whatever minutes are left.

Three practical points follow from the rules:

Under time pressure, elimination discipline is a habit worth practising on its own. When you reject an option, try to name the word that makes it wrong: a quantifier the passage never justified, a shift from "some" to "most", a claim about causes where the passage only reported an association. Train yourself to say what is wrong with each rejected option in a few words. That habit is also what makes reviewing your practice worthwhile, because you learn as much from why B was wrong as from why C was right.

Start from the honest position: UAT-UK has never released a TARA past paper. The test has not yet been sat. Official material is exactly three things: the TARA Content Specification, the TARA Question Guide, and two practice tests on the Pearson VUE landing page, which UAT-UK says mirror the exact format and software used for its live tests. Read the Question Guide properly rather than skimming it, since it defines the seven types in the examiners' own words, and sit the practice tests on screen so the interface is familiar.

After that, the legitimate material to work from is what UAT-UK itself points to. The organisation says the Critical Thinking and Problem Solving components "share a common history with the Biomedical Admissions Test (BMAT) Section 1 and the Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA)", and it hosts BMAT Section 1 papers from 2003 to 2023 and TSA Section 1 papers from 2008 to 2023 as PDFs. Those archives are large enough for months of work, and their argument-analysis questions exercise the same skills.

A workable routine: two or three weeks of untimed accuracy work, one type at a time, writing out why each rejected option fails; then timed sets of 22 questions in 40 minutes, once a week, with a review afterwards that takes longer than the sitting itself.

FrontierVUE's own contribution is 18 original parallel papers written to the published format, 22 Critical Thinking questions each, with worked solutions and Chinese translations, and papers 1 and 2 free to attempt. These are papers we write; they are not official past papers, and none exist. Our bank currently holds 539 Critical Thinking questions across the seven types: Identifying the Main Conclusion 96, Drawing a Conclusion 92, Assessing the Impact of Additional Evidence 87, Identifying an Assumption 86, Detecting Reasoning Errors 79, Matching Arguments 52, Applying Principles 47. That describes our coverage and nothing else. No official breakdown by type has ever been published, so do not read it as the shape of the real paper.