How to prepare for OMPT-B in 4 weeks

Four weeks is the compressed version. Six is more humane for the B, whose 226-topic syllabus includes trigonometry and integration that many students meet cold. Offer deadlines do not care about humane, so this is the plan I run with deadline-strapped students, hour by hour. It has changed since I first wrote it up: the official chapter weightings moved differentiation from half a week to a full one.

One assumption first: you have confirmed the letter. Econometrics at Maastricht, Groningen and VU, the AUC Sciences major, LUT engineering and Erasmus IBEB (as the alternative to the A) all sit the B. If your programme said "OMPT" with no letter, read which OMPT test you need first. A month of trigonometry for a programme that wanted the OMPT-A is the most expensive mistake on this page.

What the OMPT-B weightings say about where the hours go

omptest.org publishes learning-assessment weightings per chapter, and for the B they are lopsided in a way the syllabus page hides. The eight chapters the B shares with the A add up to 43% of the marks. The three chapters the A does not have carry 57%. Differentiation alone is a quarter of the test.

Two conclusions follow. The algebra week is not there to score algebra marks; it is there because every calculus question runs on algebra, and slow algebra is what makes 2.3 minutes per question feel like 90 seconds. And the two calculus chapters, 42% between them, each get a week of their own. My old version gave differentiation two and a half days; the students who missed their cutoff missed it in exactly that chapter.

Before day one: the diagnostic

Spend your first two and a half hours on a full timed OMPT-B mock, scored properly, no pausing. It will probably go badly, and that is fine. The point is the per-chapter breakdown, because a four-week plan has no slack for studying things you already know. A student who scores 85% on quadratics has just bought back three evenings.

1. Block 2.5 hours. Open the free timed OMPT-B mock: 64 questions, 150 minutes, no pause, phone behind you.
2. Use three sheets of paper, a pencil, and a basic calculator with no trig or log keys, because that is all the real B gives you: digits, brackets, a square key and a root key.
3. Answer in exact form (fractions, roots). Leave a question blank rather than guessing: on a diagnostic, a lucky guess is misinformation.
4. Score it, write the per-chapter percentages in the weighting order above, and circle every chapter under 40%. Multiply each chapter score by its weight and add the results; that weighted figure is your real starting point, often 10 points away from the raw score.
5. Put the date, the honest weekly hours and the weak chapters into the study planner, then adjust the week table below to match.

The four-week OMPT-B plan, week by week

What 25 hours a week actually looks like

Numbers on a plan lie comfortably, so let me make this concrete. Twenty-five hours is three and a half hours a day with one lighter day, or four focused weekday hours plus a five-hour weekend. It fits around a light summer job; it does not fit around a full-time one plus a social life. Split each day into sessions with a real break between, because hour four of a single sitting produces the kind of practice that has to be re-done. And log your hours honestly. Students who "did 25 hours" from memory usually did fifteen; the ones with a written log know, and knowing is the difference between adjusting in week two and panicking in week four.

Weeks 1 and 2: algebra at speed, then logarithms and trigonometry

The B gives you about 2.3 minutes per question across 64 questions, so correct-but-slow algebra fails the test just as surely as wrong algebra. Week one is exponents and roots, factoring, linear and quadratic equations, inequalities and function basics, done against a clock from day three onward. Not day ten. Day three. It is also the week you stop reaching for decimals: the help centre's own example is simplifying -48/408, where -2/17 scores and -0.12 does not, and the on-screen calculator will not turn a decimal back into a fraction. Read the calculator rules once now.

Week two opens with exponential functions and logarithms until the log laws are reflexes rather than lookups; the chapter is worth 10% and has 14 topics, so two days is enough for most people. Trigonometry gets the rest of the week because it is the strand most likely to be new. Start with angles and radians, and do not skip ahead until radians feel native, because everything after assumes them. Then trig functions (period, amplitude, transformations, the inverse functions), identities, and equations, including the sine and cosine rules and the addition and double-angle formulas, all of which are on the syllabus.

One fact changes how you study this chapter: there is no formula sheet, and the basic calculator has no sin, cos or log key. omptest.org says outright that you must know the special values by heart, so sin, cos and tan at 0, π/6, π/4, π/3 and π/2, with the unit-circle symmetries, is a memorisation job that gets ten minutes a day until the morning of the test. A pacing warning from experience, too: trig identities are a rabbit hole. The OMPT-B wants the standard toolkit applied cleanly, so once you can solve the drill sets, stop. Three hours proving obscure identities is three hours not spent on differentiation.

Weeks 3 and 4: differentiation, then integration and the mocks

Week three is a quarter of the marks. Monday to Wednesday is the rule set: power, sum, product, quotient and chain rules, plus the standard derivatives of sin, cos, tan, e^x, ln and log. The chain rule takes most of the time, because the B nests functions (an exponential inside a root, a trig function inside a square) and the marks are in unpicking the layers in order. Thursday to Saturday is applications: tangent lines, increasing and decreasing intervals, extrema, the second derivative and inflection points.

On the B, notes are optional: you enter the final answer and may add your calculations in a note, and partial credit exists. So from week three on, in every timed set, write the two lines that show the method on any question with more than one step. It costs 20 seconds and it is the difference between zero and partial marks on the day your algebra slips.

Week four, Monday, is antiderivatives and the definite integral as area, including area between two curves. Tuesday and Wednesday are techniques: substitution, integration by parts, trig integrals, quotients that need long division first. Solids of revolution are on the syllabus; do them once so you recognise them, then move on. Integration rewards pattern recognition, and pattern recognition comes from volume, so favour many medium problems over few hard ones. Thursday is a genuine rest day. Friday and Sunday: two full 150-minute mocks under test conditions, phone behind you, no pauses, three sheets of paper, a different paper each day. Saturday between them is for the error log and nothing new.

Pacing on those mocks: two minutes a question. Question 15 at the half hour, 30 at the hour, 45 at ninety minutes, 60 at two hours, and the last half hour for the ones you skipped. All questions load at the start and you can move freely, so skipping is free; eight minutes on one integral is not.

What to do if the diagnostic or the plan goes off course

If the weighted diagnostic came back under 35%, ask whether the test date itself can move, because compressing 100 hours of new material into four weeks is a different project from refreshing rusty knowledge in the same window. One of those reliably works; the other works for some people, some summers. Count backwards from your programme's deadline: 8 business days of grading (a Monday test returns results the following Thursday), the 72-hour booking notice, then the four weeks. Six weeks in that arithmetic means you take them and run the two-week plan as a front-loaded algebra block first. Exactly four with a fixed date means you cut depth inside trigonometry, never the calculus, and accept a lower ceiling.

Above 60%, you have margin. Trim week one to three days, bank the two spare days for trigonometry, and sit your first full mock at the end of week two. Students in this band usually carry one chapter at 30% hidden under a decent average; find it on the breakdown and give it the banked days.

When week three is slipping, which in practice means your hours log shows under 18 hours or the checkpoint came in under 50%, do not borrow from week four's mocks; they are the only honest measure you have. Downgrade integration techniques (by parts, long division) to recognise-and-skip and keep antiderivatives and the definite integral, the part of that 17% you can still bank. Then check the calendar. A rescheduled test costs a €50 admin fee; a failed one costs a €240 retake and, at Erasmus IBEB, the only attempt that counts. Move the test if the deadline allows a week. Otherwise sit it, and read what happens after a fail before the results arrive so the next decision is already made.

Who needs OMPT-B and what score to plan for

OMPT sets no pass mark; each programme does, and the B cutoffs run from 50% to 70% on the pages I can verify. Plan against your programme's number plus five points. Where a programme publishes no minimum, say so in your planning rather than borrowing another university's figure.

The go/no-go rule and the last 72 hours

Your Friday mock in week four is the signal, and I will take a position on the threshold: go if the score is at least your programme's minimum plus five points and no chapter on the breakdown is under 40%. Both conditions. A 68% average with integration at 20% is a coin flip, because the real paper may lean harder on the chapter you cannot do. For a 60% programme that means 65%; for AUC's 70%, 75%; for Maastricht SBE, where no official page states the bar, I plan to 75% and tell the student to ask admissions in writing.

One to five points under: a one-week postponement usually beats a €240 retake, provided the deadline arithmetic allows it, because the €50 admin fee is the cheapest thing on the price list. More than ten under: four weeks was not enough, and the two-week repair plan plus a new date is the route, not a hopeful sitting. Run your per-chapter figures through the score estimator for a second opinion.

Last practical bits. Book your slot at least 72 hours ahead (ProctorU charges extra inside that window), so Wednesday of week four is the latest sensible day to book a Sunday sitting. Do the equipment check the day before, and read what to expect from OMPT proctoring so the webcam routine is boring by the time it matters. The maths is the hard part. Do not let logistics take a single point from you.

Two students, same four weeks

Student one is applying to Groningen Econometrics, minimum 60%, two attempts. Her weighted diagnostic is 44%: algebra and functions around 80%, logarithms 50%, trigonometry 10%, differentiation 35%, integration blank. She trims week one to three days because the algebra is already there and spends the banked days on radians and the special values. Week-three checkpoint: 58%, differentiation up to 65%, integration still 15% because she has not started it. Friday mock in week four: 71%, integration 55%. Go. She books on the Wednesday for Sunday and waits 8 business days for the certificate from no-reply@omptest.org.

Student two is applying to Erasmus IBEB and has chosen the B route because 60% looks friendlier than 70% on the A. His weighted diagnostic is 31%, everything past quadratics under 20%, deadline twelve weeks out. This is the under-35% branch, and the calendar has room: six weeks, the two-week algebra block first, then this plan. What decides his case is the attempt cap. Only his first attempt counts, so his threshold is 65% with no chapter under 40%, and if the Friday mock says 62% he moves the date and pays the €50 rather than gambling the single attempt. The €240 retake is not available to him at any price.