If you've come across advice about Oxbridge Medicine admissions that mentions the "BMAT," it's describing a test that no longer exists. The BioMedical Admissions Test was permanently discontinued, and a real amount of prep content built around it is still circulating online -- a genuine trap for a US applicant researching Oxford or Cambridge Medicine today, since it's easy to assume a widely-cited test name is still current.
What actually happened
The BMAT was administered by Cambridge Assessment Admissions Testing (CAAT), which also ran the old ENGAA (Engineering) and NSAA (Natural Sciences) tests. CAAT stopped delivering admissions tests at the end of 2023 and was disbanded in 2024, after reporting pointed to limited evidence that the BMAT reliably predicted university performance, alongside Cambridge Assessment's broader decision to step back from running admissions testing at all. The last BMAT sitting was 18 October 2023 -- there has been no BMAT exam date in 2024, 2025, or 2026, and none is planned.
In January 2024, Cambridge and Imperial College London announced a new joint venture -- UAT-UK -- to deliver a replacement set of tests through Pearson VUE, computer-based and test-centre delivered rather than paper-based and school-delivered. That restructuring produced the ESAT (replacing ENGAA and NSAA for Engineering and Science courses) and continued the TMUA under the new administrator. But BMAT itself got no direct replacement under UAT-UK -- instead, every former BMAT medical school moved its Medicine and Dentistry admissions test requirement to the UCAT starting with the 2024 entry cycle.
What this means if you're applying to Oxbridge Medicine now
University of Oxford and University of Cambridge Medicine applicants, along with Imperial College London and UCL, all require the UCAT, not the BMAT, as their admissions test. This has been true for every entry cycle since 2024 -- it isn't a brand-new or upcoming change, but it's recent enough that a meaningful amount of test-prep content, forum advice, and even some counselor guidance still references the BMAT as if it's the current Oxbridge Medicine test.
The UCAT is a genuinely different test from the BMAT -- different format, different subtests, different registration system and timeline. Preparing for a BMAT-style test (which included a written response section and subject-knowledge multiple choice) won't transfer cleanly to the UCAT's verbal reasoning, decision making, quantitative reasoning, and situational judgement format. Our full breakdown of the UCAT covers its actual format, dates, and cost for a US-based applicant.
What this means for you
- If a source mentions the BMAT as a current requirement for Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, or UCL Medicine, it's outdated -- verify against each university's own current admissions page, not a cached guide or forum thread.
- Don't reuse BMAT prep material expecting it to transfer to the UCAT -- the two tests assess genuinely different things in genuinely different formats.
- This change is now several full application cycles old (in effect since 2024 entry), so it isn't a "coming soon" caveat -- if you're applying for 2027 entry, the UCAT has already been the standard for four cycles running.
- The BMAT's retirement is permanent, not a pause -- CAAT, the body that ran it, no longer exists, so there's no scenario where it returns under its old name and format.