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 curriculum includes trigonometry and integration that many students meet cold. But offer deadlines do not care about humane, so this is the plan I actually run with deadline-strapped students, hour by hour.

Before day one: the diagnostic

Spend your first two 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-topic breakdown, because a 4-week plan has no slack for studying things you already know. A student who scores 85% on quadratics has just bought back three evenings.

Week 1: algebra at speed (25 hours)

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. This week is exponents and roots, factoring, linear and quadratic equations, and inequalities, done against a clock from day three onward. Not day ten. Day three.

• Mon–Tue: untimed accuracy work on your two weakest algebra topics from the diagnostic.
• Wed–Fri: 45-minute timed sets daily, mixed topics, review every miss the same day.
• Weekend: one 90-minute half-mock of algebra-only material, plus a written error log.

Week 2: functions, exponentials, logarithms (25 hours)

This is where most B points hide. Domains, transformations, inverse and composite functions, then exponential functions and logarithms until the log laws are reflexes rather than lookups. Keep one timed algebra set every other day so week one does not evaporate. By Sunday, sit a second half-mock: algebra plus functions.

Week 3: trigonometry, then differentiation (25 hours)

Trig gets the front half of the week because it is the strand most likely to be genuinely new. Start with angles and radians, and do not skip ahead until radians feel native, because everything after assumes them. Then trig functions, identities, and equations. The back half of the week is differentiation rules and applications, which most students find friendlier.

A pacing warning from experience: 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 integration.

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 two 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.

If your diagnostic came back above 60%, you have margin: trim the week-one algebra block and bank the hours for trig. If it came back under 35%, the sensible move is to ask whether the test date itself can move, because compressing 100 hours of genuinely 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.

Week 4: integration and full mocks (25 hours)

Monday to Wednesday: integration basics and techniques. 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 in another room, no pauses. Saturday between them is for the error log and nothing new.

Your Friday mock is the go/no-go signal. If your target programme wants 75% (Maastricht's Econometrics benchmark), I want to see 80%+ before you sit the real thing. If you are at 70%, a one-week postponement usually beats a €240 retake, provided the deadline arithmetic allows it: remember grading takes about 8 business days on the standard track.

Last practical bits. Book your slot at least 72 hours ahead, do the proctoring tech 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.