- Part A — General Aptitude
- Logical reasoning, graphical analysis, analytical and numerical ability, quantitative comparison, series formation, puzzles, and basic data interpretation. Common to all five subjects and pitched at a level that rewards practice rather than study.
- Chemical Sciences
- Inorganic chemistry covering chemical periodicity, structure and bonding, coordination chemistry, main group and transition elements, bioinorganic chemistry, organometallics and nuclear chemistry; physical chemistry covering quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, electrochemistry, surface phenomena and spectroscopy; and organic chemistry covering stereochemistry, reaction mechanisms, named reactions, synthetic strategies, natural products, heterocycles and spectroscopic determination of structures.
- Life Sciences
- Molecules and their interaction relevant to biology; cellular organisation; fundamental processes including replication, transcription and translation; cell communication and signalling; developmental biology; system physiology in plants and animals; inheritance biology; diversity of life forms; ecological principles; evolution and behaviour; applied biology; and methods in biology including molecular biology techniques, microscopy, statistical methods and radiolabelling.
- Physical Sciences
- Mathematical methods of physics; classical mechanics; electromagnetic theory; quantum mechanics; thermodynamic and statistical physics; electronics and experimental methods; atomic and molecular physics; condensed matter physics; nuclear and particle physics; and the associated experimental techniques and data analysis.
- Mathematical Sciences
- Analysis and linear algebra; complex analysis, algebra and topology; ordinary and partial differential equations, numerical analysis, calculus of variations, linear integral equations and classical mechanics; and descriptive statistics, probability, statistical inference, design of experiments and operations research, with candidates attempting units according to their specialisation.
- Earth, Atmospheric, Ocean and Planetary Sciences
- The earth and planetary system, geodynamics, geological time scale, mineralogy and petrology, structural geology and geotectonics, palaeontology, sedimentology and stratigraphy, marine geology, geochemistry, economic geology, and the atmospheric and ocean science components including meteorology, physical and chemical oceanography, and applied areas.
What the syllabus does not convey is the difference between Part B and Part C depth. Part B asks whether you know the subject; Part C asks whether you can use it — deriving, applying and reasoning through problems that do not have a recalled answer. Two candidates with identical factual knowledge can score very differently on Part C, and it is the part that carries the most marks.
Read your subject syllabus alongside three or four past papers rather than on its own. The syllabus describes a postgraduate discipline in outline and gives no sense of the two very different demands the paper makes of it — Part B asking whether you know the material, Part C asking whether you can use it on a problem you have not seen. A topic can be comfortable at Part B depth and genuinely difficult at Part C depth, and only the papers reveal which of your topics are which.
Part A is common to every subject
Logical reasoning, graphical analysis, analytical and numerical ability, quantitative comparisons and series formation are the same for a life sciences candidate and a mathematical sciences one. It is a small, learnable section that responds to twice-weekly practice, and it is the one part of this examination where material written for other competitive tests transfers directly.
