Most applicants know the UPCAT has four parts. Rather fewer know what those parts actually contain, and that gap is where a lot of wasted revision time goes. This is a walk through each subtest: what it asks, where people reliably lose marks, and what preparation actually helps.
One framing note before we start. UP does not publish an official item count per subtest, and the balance has shifted over the years. Treat any reviewer that states exact numbers with mild suspicion, including ours: our own question bank uses a sensible practice spread, not a replica of the real paper. What is stable is the *content* of each subtest, which is what this article covers.
1. Language Proficiency
This subtest is about correctness and precision in expression, and it is set in both English and Filipino. That bilingual structure is the most important thing to internalise, because it is the thing most reviewers quietly skip.
The English half
Expect items that test whether you can spot and fix problems in a sentence. The recurring areas are:
- Subject-verb agreement, especially where a prepositional phrase sits between the subject and the verb, or where the subject is an indefinite pronoun like *each* or *neither*.
- Pronoun case and agreement — the *between you and me* family of errors, and *who* against *whom*.
- Verb tense and sequence, particularly the past perfect for the earlier of two past events.
- Modifiers — dangling and misplaced ones, including the position of limiting words like *only*.
- Parallelism in a series, where all items must share a grammatical form.
- Commonly confused pairs — *affect* and *effect*, *lie* and *lay*, *fewer* and *less*, *its* and *it's*.
- Punctuation, especially comma splices, semicolon use, and commas around non-restrictive clauses.
- Vocabulary in context and idiom, where you infer meaning from the surrounding sentence.
The Filipino half
The Filipino items reward people who studied the language as a subject rather than only speaking it. The high-frequency areas are:
- Wastong gamit — the classic pairs. *Ng* against *nang*, *din* against *rin*, *kung* against *kong*.
- Aspekto ng pandiwa — perpektibo, imperpektibo and kontemplatibo, and recognising which one a given verb form carries.
- Panghalip — including the inclusive and exclusive distinction between *tayo* and *kami*, which has no direct English equivalent.
- Panlapi and asimilasyon — how *pang-* becomes *pam-* before b and p, and *pan-* before d, l, r, s and t.
- Tayutay — metapora, pagtutulad or simili, personipikasyon, pagmamalabis.
- Sawikain at idyoma — figurative expressions whose meaning you cannot derive literally.
- Kasingkahulugan at kasalungat — synonyms and antonyms.
The *din* and *rin* rule is a good example of why revision beats intuition. Fluent speakers often get it right by ear without being able to state the rule, then get it wrong under time pressure. The rule itself is simple: *rin* after a vowel or after w and y, *din* after other consonants. Knowing it explicitly is faster and more reliable than guessing.
2. Reading Comprehension
Also bilingual. You read passages and answer questions about them, and the passages come in both English and Filipino. This is not a test of what you already know about the topic. It is a test of whether you can extract meaning from text you have never seen, quickly and accurately.
The question types repeat predictably:
| Question type | What it is asking |
|---|---|
| Main idea | The single claim that binds the whole passage, not one supporting detail |
| Explicit detail | Something the passage states outright, which you must locate rather than recall |
| Inference | What follows from the passage without being stated, staying inside the evidence |
| Vocabulary in context | The meaning a word carries here, which may not be its most common meaning |
| Tone, purpose and stance | Why the author wrote it and how they feel about the subject |
| Structure | The function of a particular paragraph within the argument |
The commonest failure mode is answering from prior knowledge or from what feels reasonable rather than from the passage. A statement can be perfectly true about the world and still be the wrong answer, because the passage does not support it. Train yourself to point at the sentence that justifies your choice. If you cannot find one, you are guessing.
3. Science
Science samples broadly rather than testing each discipline in a separate labelled block. Expect items drawn across four areas:
- Biology — cell structure and organelles, the organ systems, genetics and Mendelian inheritance, enzymes and digestion, photosynthesis and respiration, ecology and the nutrient cycles, cell division.
- Chemistry — atomic structure, isotopes, the periodic table and its trends, ionic and covalent bonding, the mole and molar mass, balancing equations, acids and bases and the pH scale, physical against chemical change, oxidation and reduction.
- Physics — Newton's laws, forces and motion, work and energy and their transformations, waves and their properties, optics including reflection and refraction, basic electricity and Ohm's law.
- Earth and space science — the layers of the Earth, plate tectonics and boundary types, rock classification, the water cycle, the atmosphere and its layers, the causes of seasons, moon phases, and the geology of the Philippine setting including the Pacific Ring of Fire.
The level of the questions rewards conceptual understanding rather than memorised trivia. Knowing that mitochondria produce ATP is a fact; understanding why a cell with high energy demands has more of them is comprehension, and comprehension is what gets tested when a question is phrased in an unfamiliar way.
Calculation does appear, but it is usually light and mental: force from mass and acceleration, current from voltage and resistance, molar mass from a formula. You will not be given a calculator, which is a deliberate signal about the scale of arithmetic expected.
4. Mathematics
The Mathematics subtest spans most of what a K-12 student has covered, weighted towards the middle of that range rather than the most advanced material.
- Arithmetic and number sense — fractions, ratio and proportion, percentages including discount and successive change, simple and compound interest.
- Algebra — linear equations and inequalities, systems of equations, quadratics and factoring, exponents and radicals, functions and their domains, absolute value, logarithms and exponential equations.
- Geometry — angle relationships, triangles and the Pythagorean theorem, polygons and their angle sums, circles including arc length and area, perimeter and area of plane figures, surface area and volume of solids.
- Coordinate geometry — slope, parallel and perpendicular lines, the vertex of a parabola.
- Trigonometry — the basic ratios and the special angles.
- Statistics and probability — mean, median and mode, simple probability, permutations and combinations.
- Word problems — work rate, distance-rate-time including catch-up scenarios, mixtures, ages, consecutive integers.
Two specific traps recur often enough to name. The first is successive percentage change: increasing a quantity by 20% and then decreasing the result by 20% does not return you to the original, because the two percentages are taken from different bases. The second is reverse percentage: if an item sells for a given price *after* a discount, you divide by the remaining fraction rather than adding the percentage back on.
What all four subtests quietly reward
Look across the four and a common skill emerges that no syllabus lists: reading a question precisely under time pressure. A large share of lost marks in every subtest come not from missing knowledge but from answering a slightly different question than the one asked.
Three recurring versions of that failure:
- Missing a negation. "Which is NOT a function of the liver?" is a different question from the one your eye expects, and fatigue makes the *not* invisible.
- Answering the more familiar problem. Under pressure the brain pattern-matches to a similar item it has practised and solves that one instead. Reverse-percentage questions catch people this way constantly.
- Choosing something true but unasked. Especially in Reading Comprehension, an option can be entirely accurate about the world and still be wrong, because the passage does not support it.
The countermeasure is unglamorous: slow down on the wording and be able to point at your justification. It costs a few seconds per item and it is worth more than another week of content revision.
The subtest nobody lists: stamina
The administration runs about five hours. That is longer than almost any test you have sat, and concentration decays. Applicants routinely report that their accuracy in the final subtest was noticeably worse than in the first, not because the material was harder but because they were tired.
This is trainable, and almost nobody trains it. Doing four twenty-minute practice sets across a week is useful for content but does nothing for endurance. Sitting one long, uninterrupted session under realistic conditions is uncomfortable and far more informative. Do it at least once before test day so the fatigue is familiar rather than alarming.
How to divide your revision time
A reasonable default is to weight your time towards whichever subtests you are weakest in, with two adjustments. Give Filipino more attention than feels natural, because it is under-practised relative to its weight across two subtests. And give Mathematics steady, frequent attention rather than long occasional blocks, because computational fluency decays faster than conceptual knowledge.
For a concrete schedule, see how to review for the UPCAT. To work on one area at a time, our topic hubs break the whole bank down by skill, and every question shows a worked explanation rather than just a letter.