TSA

The TSA critical thinking questions will often ask you to find a conclusion, assumption, flaw, or ask you to assess whether a certain premise strengthens or weakens the argument. In order to be able to attempt these questions, you need to know the definitions of the words mentioned above and how they formulate an argument.

It’s very important that you are able to understand and identify all these individual elements so you can then work on critiquing the argument correctly and quickly!

By doing a mock practice right at the start of your preparation, you will be able to identify which section needs the most work and spend more time on that one. Don’t waste time unnecessarily on the sections that you are already very confident of .

The TSA critical thinking questions involve a chunk of text; it is a good idea to practice summarising arguments into one sentence so that you learn how to identify the main argument within a text.

Practice this exercise with newspaper articles: try and summarise each paragraph into one sentence and check with a friend to see if they agree you’ve managed to identify the crux of the argument.

As mentioned, the TSA critical thinking questions often ask you to identify from a long paragraph how an argument could be weakened or what assumption has been made to hold the argument. You want to make sure you have learnt how to do this.

Practice this skill by reading articles or opinion pieces, and identify the one statement that would weaken the argument or stop it being true. The TSA questions can catch you out by using information that it knows is not true so remember your answer must be based purely on the information you have in the text in front of you!

The problem-solving question of section 1 becomes a lot easier if you are quick with numbers and your GCSEs maths. Remember formulae for calculating volumes and areas of simple shapes as a lot of the questions are spatial and require you to calculate border sizes or volume. Also apply the BIDMAS rule (Brackets, Indices, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction)

This is vital for TSA success. Section 1 allows less than two minutes per question. Remember there is no negative marking. Each question is equally weighted so you would be better off moving on than spending more than two minutes on a question - make an educated guess by cancelling out any answers you know are wrong and flag and come back to the question later.

The official TSA website contains a wealth of past papers – from 2003 to last year’s papers. They will indicate to you your strengths and weaknesses and will also familiarise you with the structure of the test.

Take advantage of this free resource: TSA Oxford past paper: https://www.admissionstesting.org/for-test-takers/thinking-skills-assessment/tsa-oxford/preparing-for-tsa-oxford/