How Hard Is the OMPT? Difficulty by Variant (2026)

The question reaches my inbox in two forms. The nervous form, "is OMPT-A hard?", comes from a student with a conditional offer and no maths since sixteen. The overconfident form, "it is just school maths, right?", comes from a student who has not yet met the answer field. Both get the same reply: the OMPT is a placement test with published syllabi, published weights and a published study-hour estimate, so its difficulty can be described rather than guessed at.

What follows uses only the numbers omptest.org and the universities print themselves, plus my own ranking of the seven letters, which I label as opinion where it is opinion. If you do not yet know which letter you need, read which OMPT test do I need first, because difficulty means nothing until the letter is fixed.

All seven OMPT variants in one table

Minutes per question separates the sprint tests (A, B and E at 2.3 to 3 minutes) from the essay tests (D and F at 8.6). The study-hour column is omptest.org's own estimate, footnoted as varying per learner; it is about right for a student who last did the material two years ago and low for someone starting from nothing.

What omptest.org says about how hard the OMPT is

The practising page carries the one statistic I quote to every new student: on average, candidates who spent time with the official learning materials scored 76% on their first attempt, while those who did not scored 40%. Read that as a claim about preparation rather than about the test. A 36-point gap between prepared and unprepared candidates means the questions are learnable, and it also means walking in cold is a reliable way to fail a 60% bar.

The help centre adds a second statement that should change how you prepare. For OMPT-A, B, C and E, the test questions and difficulty level are described as similar to the practice material. For OMPT-D and F, the tests include open-ended and essay-type questions, some covering several topics and needing several steps, and these are harder than the practice exercises. So the practice material predicts your A result well and your D result badly; D candidates need the official mock, which is written at test difficulty.

Third, the blog on how the tests are created places A and B mainly at the knowledge level of Bloom's taxonomy, and D and F at application and analysis. In plain terms, an A question asks you to carry out a known procedure correctly; a D question asks you to decide which procedures to combine. That is the difference in kind, and it matters more than question counts.

What the universities see after admission

Two partner institutions have published outcome data, and both point the same way: candidates who clear the OMPT bar do fine afterwards. Erasmus School of Economics reports that IBEB students admitted through the OMPT scored 7.42 in Mathematics and Game Theory against 6.22 for the rest of the cohort. An anonymised Dutch research university's IBA programme, in a case study on omptest.org, found that 96% of students admitted with an OMPT-A pass at 75% or higher progressed to the second year in the 2021 cohort, against 90% the year before.

This belongs in a post about difficulty because it shows what the cutoffs are calibrated to. A 75% bar on the A, which is what RSM asks for its IBA, is the level at which the admitted group stops underperforming in first-year maths. Students who ask me whether a 72% "might be enough" are asking the wrong office; OMPT passing scores explained covers near misses.

How many questions you can miss at 60, 70 and 75%

Percentages hide the arithmetic, so here it is per letter. The table assumes whole questions right or wrong. In reality partial credit exists on every variant and no points are subtracted for wrong answers, so treat these as the worst case.

The row that surprises people is the D. With 21 questions and a 60% bar you can lose 8 whole questions, which sounds generous until you remember each is a multi-step problem worth close to 5% of the test. On the A, 13 misses at 75% is why a well-prepared student can afford to skip two or three questions and return to them. Put your own mock result into the score estimator to see where you stand against your bar.

My difficulty ladder, easiest to hardest

This ranking is mine, built from marking mocks, and omptest.org publishes nothing like it. From easiest to hardest: C, A, F, E, B, G, D.

• The C sits at the bottom: four chapters, 66 topics, four minutes a question. Its difficulty is exactness, not content.
• Next the A: eight chapters up to differentiation, 2.3 minutes a question, the most-taken variant by a distance.
• The F covers A material minus the numbers chapter, but as 21 long-form problems with written working scored by two graders. Same content, harder format, which is why I place it above the A even though it has fewer topics.
• Above the F I put the E, because half its syllabus (descriptive statistics, probability, combinatorics, random variables, distributions) is new to most school leavers, and 3 minutes a question leaves no time to derive anything.
• The B has 226 topics, 64 questions and 150 minutes: everything on the A plus trigonometry and integration, held at A pace for an extra half hour. Full comparison in is OMPT-B harder than OMPT-A.
• The G ranks above the B for one reason: 20% of its marks are mechanics and chemistry, which no maths preparation touches. Its 119 topics undersell it.
• The D at the top: 242 topics, the widest syllabus, geometry with parametric curves and vectors, limits, and written working on every question that two graders score against a rubric.

Is OMPT-A hard, and what makes each of the others hard

A, B and E: the pace

On OMPT-A, 52 questions in 120 minutes means the first twenty must be banked fast to buy time for the differentiation and logarithm questions near the end. The A is hard the way a long driving test is hard: no single manoeuvre is difficult, and there are 52 of them. The B stretches the same pace across 226 topics for 150 minutes. The E adds a reading problem: probability questions written in set and conditional notation take longer to read than to solve, and 3 minutes a question is not reading time.

C: exactness

With four minutes a question, nobody fails the C for time. They fail it in the answer field. Numbers carries 35% of the C marks, and omptest.org's own example is precise about what counts: simplify -48/408, and the correct entry is -2/17, while -0.12 scores nothing. The on-screen calculator shows decimals and will not convert them back. C candidates need exponents and roots done by hand until exact form is the reflex.

D: breadth, and the note

The D is hard three times over. Its syllabus is the widest, 242 topics including limits, parametric curves, vectors and solids of revolution. Its questions combine topics, so a single problem may open with a trig identity and close with a definite integral. And every answer needs written calculations in a note, which two graders score step by step against rubric lines of the form "25% of the full grade if this step". A correct final answer with no working is a partial score. The OMPT-D survival guide covers how to write the note.

E: statistics notation

Students arrive at the E with reasonable algebra and no probability. The syllabus runs from measurement scales and quantiles through conditional probability and contingency tables to permutations, expected value, and the binomial and normal distributions. The statistics calculator has Normal, Inverse Normal, Binomial and Cumulative Binomial buttons, so the arithmetic is not the obstacle; knowing which button the question is asking for is. Drill probability basics until the notation reads as fast as English.

F: long-form

The F has no numbers chapter and no trig or integration, yet costs €270 and takes three hours. Its difficulty is the format: 21 problems, differentiation alone worth 40% of the marks, working required, two graders. A student who can find a derivative but cannot write a clean argument from "find the tangent line" to the equation of the line loses marks on content they know.

G: the science chapters

Mechanics and chemistry are 10% each of the G, set at the level of motion equations under constant acceleration, free-body diagrams, work and energy, balancing molecular and ionic equations, redox half-reactions and pH. None of that appears in any other OMPT variant, and no maths tutor will cover it unasked. The remaining 80% is functions-heavy (45% on functions, graphs and equations alone), so a G candidate with strong algebra is closer than the 120-hour estimate suggests, provided the science weeks are booked separately.

How to measure how hard the OMPT is for you

1. Fix the letter from your offer or the programme page, never from a forum. The OMPT registration form lists the variant per programme; the minimum score is only on the university page.
2. Sit the free timed mock for that letter under test conditions: for example the free OMPT-D mock at 180 minutes, alone, phone behind you, on-screen calculator only, three sheets of scratch paper.
3. Record the overall score and the per-chapter scores, then subtract your bar. A gap under 10 points is a pace and polish problem; 10 to 25 points is a content problem in named chapters; over 25 points is a syllabus problem.
4. Read the gap against the official study hours. An A candidate 20 points under the bar needs most of the 80 hours; a D candidate 20 points under needs the full 120 and probably more.
5. Book the test only when a full-length mock clears the bar with margin. I want 85% on a mock for a 75% bar and 70% for a 60% bar, because real tests come out a few points under the last mock for most of my students.

What to do if your diagnostic comes in low

If the mock lands within 10 points of your bar, the test is not too hard for you; it is too fast for you. Do timed sets from the two heaviest chapters (on the A, differentiation at 20% and quadratics and functions at 22%) three times a week, and book for two to three weeks out. With 60 or more days in hand and €90 to spare, buy the official mock, because for A, B, C and E it predicts the real test closely.

If the mock lands 10 to 25 points under, count the chapters responsible. When two chapters explain most of the gap, four weeks of the official hours will usually close it; the study planner turns the weeks into a grid. When the damage is spread across every chapter, the honest reading is that you are at the start of the syllabus, and the letter's full study-hour estimate is the minimum.

If the mock is more than 25 points under, or below 35% outright, check two things before you buy an attempt: how many attempts your programme allows (the official exceptions page lists many programmes at two, and Erasmus School of Economics and several UvA programmes at one), and whether your deadline leaves room for a repair cycle after a failed first sitting. With one attempt and a close deadline, ask admissions in writing whether a CCVX or Boswell certificate is accepted instead, and whether the deadline can move. With three attempts and time, a first real sitting is a paid diagnostic with a per-topic certificate, and I have watched students use it that way and pass on the second.

Two students, two verdicts

Student one holds a Maastricht International Business offer, needs 75% on the A, and stopped maths after a business-track course two years ago. Her free A mock comes in at 58%, with numbers and algebra at 85% and differentiation at 25%. The gap is 17 points, and one chapter worth 20% of the marks explains most of it. She does the differentiation rules drills for two weeks, then timed mixed sets, and books a slot three weeks before 15 August with the 8 business days of grading in hand. For her, "how hard" has a number attached: 17 points in one chapter.

Student two needs 60% on the D for a computer science programme, has two attempts, and holds A-level maths at a middling grade. His free D mock scores 38% in 180 minutes, with three questions left blank and no working on the ones he got wrong. The gap is 22 points, but the shape is worse than the number: he has never met parametric curves, and his notes earned nothing because he wrote none. For him the D is hard in the official sense, and the 120 hours are real. He gets an eight-week plan, a first real attempt as a diagnostic in week five, and the second attempt in week eight.