The last week before your OMPT: taper, do not cram

Every August my inbox fills with the same message: a student six days from their sitting asking whether they can still "quickly cover" a chapter they skipped. My answer is almost always no, and it annoys people, so this post is the long version of the no, plus what to do instead. The plan assumes your test is in seven days and your preparation has been mostly honest. If it has not, the question is whether to postpone, and the answer arrives on day seven.

The last week before OMPT, day by day

Day 7: the dress-rehearsal mock

A full timed mock (the free OMPT-A or OMPT-B mock here scores itself on the spot; the official one takes 8 business days) under real conditions: your actual test desk, the time of day of your booked slot, phone in another room, no pauses, the same three sheets of A4 and pencils. Score it and read the per-topic breakdown coldly. This mock is your go/no-go gate. Comfortably above your cutoff, ten points is my rule, and the week is about maintenance. Well below it, postponing beats hoping; a rebooked slot is cheaper than a burned attempt, and ProctorU wants 72 hours of notice, so decide now, not Thursday.

What to do if the day-7 mock is under your cutoff

Run the score estimator on the breakdown first, so you react to a projected score, not a raw mock number. Then branch. Ten or more points above the cutoff: keep the date and follow the table. Within 10 points either side: keep the date, but days 4 and 3 go entirely to the two biggest chapters on your breakdown; a 5-point swing on an OMPT-A is three questions, which live inside one weak chapter. Ten to 20 below: with three attempts and a deadline weeks away, sit it as a paid diagnostic and start the retake plan that evening. More than 20 below: postpone unless the deadline leaves no room. Rescheduling costs a €50 admin fee; a lost attempt costs €240 or €270.

The attempt cap decides that branch. Erasmus IBEB counts only the first attempt, so an under-prepared sitting there is the result, not a diagnostic. Maastricht SBE wants 75% on OMPT-A, reviews 70 to 74% individually, and allows three attempts, so a projected 68% is a fair gamble there and a bad one at Rotterdam.

Day 6: review, and only review

No new questions today. Take yesterday's misses and your error log from the whole prep cycle and sort every mistake into two piles: knowledge gaps ("I could not do this") and mechanical slips ("I could, and botched it"). Knowledge gaps from a small topic get a drill session tomorrow, logarithms and quadratic equations being the usual suspects on the A and B. Mechanical slips, the flipped signs and lost negative roots I catalogued in the algebra-mistakes post, get written as one-line rules on a single sheet. That sheet is your day-one revision material. Add one line for answer format: exact unless a decimal is asked for, so −2/17 scores and −0.12 does not.

Day 5: second mock, then days 4 and 3 shrink

Same conditions as day seven. The score matters less than the trend and the pacing: did the day-six fixes hold, and did you finish with minutes to spare? Most students score a few points higher, which helps sleep. If something new broke instead, that topic owns days four and three.

Those two days are two hours each, maximum: short timed sets of ten or twelve on the logged topics, full review after each. For a B candidate that is usually differentiation rules and integrals; for a D candidate it is written solutions, because OMPT-D and F require your calculations in a note. The volume feels wrong after weeks of heavy prep; that is the taper working. Fatigue you bank now is paid out on question 50. Athletes figured this out decades ago. Students resist it every single intake.

Day 2: the ProctorU logistics run

No maths today. A failed webcam at check-in is the most avoidable way to lose a paid attempt; avoid it today, on the exact laptop, room and connection you will use.

1. Log in to OMPT, open the "Test info & access" class and click "Go to ProctorU". Check the phone number and time zone in your ProctorU profile.
2. Click "Download Guardian" and install it. The test only runs inside this locked-down browser, and work or school laptops with admin restrictions often break it.
3. Click "Test Your Equipment", choose "Open Guardian Browser" in the pop-up, and let it check the microphone, camera and speakers.
4. Lay out the desk kit: a government-issued photo ID in Latin script (a second ID is recommended), 3 blank A4 sheets, 3 pencils, 1 eraser, a clear transparent bottle. No pens, no formula sheet, no watch.
5. Set the room up: alone, door visible behind you in the webcam, glass covered, bare hard desk, one chair. Keep a mirror or your phone to hand for the pre-test scan, held up so the proctor can see your screen; the phone then goes behind you, visible and out of reach.
6. Unplug any second monitor, close every other program, disable the screensaver and sleep timer, plug in the charger. Use a cable if you can; wifi is discouraged, a hotspot is banned.
7. Memorise your OMPT login; you enter it twice on the day and a password manager may not open inside Guardian. Brief the household: nobody enters for the test length plus 30 minutes. No toilet breaks.

Day 1: almost nothing

Thirty minutes with your slip sheet and maybe five easy warm-up questions from a topic you like. Then stop. Walk, cook, watch something undemanding, sleep at your normal hour. I know one student who ran a full mock the evening before, scored badly on fatigue, and carried that number into the real sitting like a stone. The mock measured nothing except tiredness. Do not gift yourself that stone.

OMPT test day tips: the morning and the check-in

Eat something normal and do three or four gentle warm-up questions on paper so the first scored question is not your first mathematics of the day. The check-in takes 5 to 10 minutes, none of it deducted.

1. Fifteen minutes before your slot, open Guardian, log in to OMPT, open "Test info & access", click "Go to ProctorU", then "Start Session". The system check runs, then the automated pre-test photos of you and your ID.
2. A live proctor connects by voice and chat. Confirm the rules, show both sides of all three A4 sheets, do the room and screen scan with the mirror or phone, then put the phone behind you.
3. The proctor sends you to the OMPT site: log in again, click Start, and the clock begins.
4. If the internet drops, keep answering (the questions loaded at the start), reconnect via "Reconnect with ProctorU" on the overview page, and note the minutes lost.
5. To finish: overview button top left, Submit bottom left, tell the proctor in the chat, erase your notes and tear each sheet into small pieces on camera. Skip this and the appointment is invalid.

Then close the laptop. Standard grading takes up to 8 business days from the day after submission (a Monday test lands on the Thursday of the following week); fast grading (€120) makes it that Friday. Replaying question 31 in your head has never once changed a certificate.

Pacing checkpoints for every OMPT variant

Pace by checkpoint, not by feel. The table leaves about ten minutes for a second pass over flagged questions, so it runs slightly ahead of the even split. When a question stalls you for three minutes, flag it, bank the easy points ahead, and return. With no negative marking, a blank is the only guaranteed zero.

The cramming question, answered properly

Why is the rescue mission such a bad trade? Arithmetic, mostly. A chapter you never studied might be worth three or four questions, and a final-week cram converts to points at a miserable rate; under exam pressure, week-old shallow knowledge is the first thing that evaporates. The same ten hours spent consolidating strong topics protects fifteen or twenty questions you would otherwise leak through fatigue and rust. You are not choosing between covering the chapter and not covering it. You are choosing which points to show up with, and the consolidation points are simply bigger. The one exception is a formula-sized gap, the quotient rule say. Anything bigger needs the two-week plan and a later date.

Two students, two last weeks

Student one is sitting the OMPT-A for Maastricht International Business, cutoff 75%, three attempts, and the day-7 mock comes in at 81%. Maintenance branch. Day 6 shows five of her nine misses are change-of-base or "solve for x in the exponent" questions, so days 4 and 3 are an hour each on logarithms. Day 5 mock: 84%, 12 minutes to spare. On day 2 she finds a glass door in shot, hangs a sheet over it and sends support a photo. She passes q28 at the hour and submits at 1:52.

Student two is sitting the OMPT-D for KU Leuven Business Engineering, where the bar is 60% (or SAT maths 730 and above, or ACT maths 32 and above). His day-7 mock scores 48%: 70% on algebra and functions, under 30% on integration. The "10 to 20 below" branch. With three attempts and five weeks to the deadline he keeps the date, and days 4 and 3 go to integration techniques alone, written solutions only. On day 6 he also books a second attempt three weeks out; if sitting one clears 60% he cancels it for the €50 admin fee rather than rebook a €270 attempt in a panic.