A Three-Month TR-YÖS Study Plan

Three months is enough time to move from uncertain about the TR-YÖS to genuinely prepared for it. It is not a huge window, and it will require consistent work. But the exam has a fixed, well-defined structure, and that structure is something you can learn to use in your favour. This plan takes you through that process step by step.

Before the schedule, a quick orientation on what you are actually preparing for.

What the TR-YÖS Actually Tests

The official ÖSYM format gives you 80 questions across 100 minutes. The questions are split equally into two tests: 40 questions of Numerical Ability and 40 questions of Basic Mathematics. Both tests appear in a single booklet, and the time is shared across both. You decide, in the room, how to divide those 100 minutes between them. That freedom is genuinely useful, but only if you arrive with a deliberate strategy rather than improvising on the day.

Each question has five options. Your raw score for each test is calculated as correct answers minus one quarter of wrong answers. The two raw scores are then combined into a final score, with Basic Mathematics carrying a weight of 0.55 and Numerical Ability carrying a weight of 0.45. Basic Mathematics therefore matters slightly more, and your preparation time should reflect that.

There is no calculator. There is no separate scratch paper. Working is done in the blank space of the question booklet itself, and ÖSYM provides pencils. This is not a minor logistical detail. It shapes how you need to train.

The Guessing Rule, Understood Properly

The quarter-mark penalty trips up many candidates. Here is how to think about it clearly.

If you guess blindly across five options, you will, on average, get one right and four wrong for every five guesses. One correct answer gives you one point. Four wrong answers cost you four times one quarter, which is one point. You end up exactly at zero. A blind guess is worth nothing on average.

The rule changes the moment you can eliminate even one option. With four remaining options, a random guess gives you an expected value above zero. The more options you can eliminate, the more worthwhile a guess becomes. The practical implication is straightforward: do not guess on questions where every option looks equally plausible. Do guess, without hesitation, when you have done real work and narrowed the field.

This is also a reason not to leave the exam with unanswered questions you had partially worked through. If you spent 90 seconds on a question and ruled out two options, marking one of the remaining three is the rational move.

Month One: Foundations and Diagnosis

The goal of the first month is to build a working base across every topic and to identify, with real evidence, where your weaknesses are.

Weeks One and Two: No-Calculator Arithmetic from Day One

The most important habit to establish immediately is working without a calculator and without separate scratch paper. Students who begin preparing with a calculator and then try to drop it in week eight are training themselves to be slower under real conditions, not faster. From your very first practice session, use only a pencil and the margin of whatever you are working in.

Numerical Ability covers number sequences, figure patterns, operations defined within the question itself, and logic puzzles. None of these require memorised formulas. They require you to read carefully, reason systematically, and work quickly with basic arithmetic in your head or on the page. Start by practising sequence and pattern problems at a pace that feels slightly uncomfortable. The goal is not to feel relaxed; it is to build speed through repetition.

Basic Mathematics covers a wider syllabus: number properties, fractions and powers, equations and inequalities, functions, word problems involving percentages, rates, and ages, counting and probability, and geometry including coordinate geometry. In weeks one and two, do a single honest pass through every topic. You are not trying to master anything yet. You are auditing your own knowledge, finding the topics where your intuition is solid and the ones where you have to think hard just to start a problem.

Work in sessions of 45 to 60 minutes. Keep a log, even a rough one, of which topics felt easy and which felt slow or uncertain.

Weeks Three and Four: Consolidate and Test

By week three you should have a clearer sense of the terrain. Use this week to revisit the topics that felt shaky in the audit and to push your mental arithmetic speed further. Practise doing geometry problems, including coordinate geometry, without a calculator. Practise percentage and rate word problems by writing working clearly in a small margin space, as you will have to on the day.

At the end of week four, sit a full timed diagnostic test under as close to real conditions as you can manage: 100 minutes, no calculator, no extra paper, pencil only. Use the AxoPrep TR-YÖS practice tool to access timed practice material structured around the real format. When you finish, score both sections separately and honestly. Note not just which questions you got wrong, but which ones you got right slowly, which ones you left blank, and which ones you guessed on. This diagnostic is your roadmap for month two.

Month Two: Targeted Work and Single-Test Drills

Month two is where most of the real score improvement happens. The diagnostic has told you something specific: there are topics where you are losing marks unnecessarily, and there are topics where you are spending too much time relative to the marks available.

Weeks Five and Six: Attack Your Weak Topics

Identify your two or three weakest Basic Mathematics topics and your weakest Numerical Ability category from the diagnostic. These get the majority of your active study time in weeks five and six. Active study means solving problems, checking your working, identifying the error, and doing more problems of the same type. It does not mean re-reading notes.

Because ÖSYM does not publish the number of questions drawn from each topic, you cannot assume that any topic is safe to neglect. A topic that felt minor during revision can appear in enough questions to move your score meaningfully. The safest approach is to bring everything to a functional level and to excel in the areas that come most naturally to you.

Keep practising the full range of Numerical Ability question types in parallel. Figure patterns and custom-defined operations in particular reward a specific skill: reading the question's own rules carefully before doing anything else. This is a trainable habit. Students who rush these questions and try to apply outside logic frequently get them wrong. Students who slow down for the first 20 seconds and understand the question's internal logic then solve them quickly.

Weeks Seven and Eight: Timed Single-Test Drills

By week seven, start doing timed drills on each test separately. Sit 40 Numerical Ability questions in 45 minutes. Sit 40 Basic Mathematics questions in 50 minutes. Then reverse the split. Try 40 minutes on one and 55 on the other. The point of this variation is to develop a calibrated sense of how time feels against each test, and to start forming a view about your preferred split for the real exam.

Track your accuracy and your timing for each topic within these drills. You are looking for two things: topics where your accuracy is improving (which means your targeted work in weeks five and six is taking hold), and topics where you are consistently spending more time than the questions are worth.

Continue using the AxoPrep TR-YÖS practice tool to ensure you are working with appropriately formatted material. Format familiarity reduces cognitive load on the actual exam. The less you have to think about how to read the question, the more you can spend thinking about how to solve it.

Month Three: Simulations and Strategy

Month three has a single overriding goal: arriving at the real exam having already done the difficult thinking about strategy, so that on the day you are executing a plan rather than making it up.

Weeks Nine and Ten: Full Timed Simulations

Do at least three full 100-minute simulations in conditions that mirror the exam as closely as possible. Same time of day as your scheduled exam if you can manage it. Pencil only. No calculator. Booklet-style paper with margins that you treat as your only workspace.

After each simulation, analyse it systematically. Calculate your raw score for each test separately. Calculate your weighted final score. Compare it to your previous simulation. But more usefully, look at the distribution of your time. Were there questions you spent too long on before abandoning them? Were there whole topic clusters that cost you disproportionate time? Were there questions you left blank that you had actually partially solved?

The habit of not abandoning partial work is worth reinforcing here. If you have eliminated two options, mark one of the remaining three. If you have eliminated three, mark one of the remaining two. You are not guessing at that point; you are using your work.

Weeks Eleven and Twelve: Lock in Your Time-Split

The final two weeks are partly about maintenance and partly about committing to your time-split strategy.

The exam gives you 100 minutes for 80 questions across two tests. The average is 75 seconds per question, but averages are not strategy. Your personal strategy should be based on your simulation data. If your Basic Mathematics accuracy is higher but your speed is slower, you may want to allocate more time there, given that it also carries more weight in the final score. If your Numerical Ability is faster for you but less accurate, you may want a slightly longer window there to slow down and check.

There is no universally correct split. The right split is the one that, for you, produces the highest weighted score. Your simulations tell you what that is. Write it down before exam day so you are not making the decision under pressure in the room.

In these final two weeks, avoid the temptation to introduce entirely new material. If there is a topic you have genuinely never touched, a brief exposure is better than nothing. But the primary work now is reinforcing what you have built and reducing anxiety through familiarity. Do shorter timed drills, review your most common error types, and ensure your mental arithmetic is sharp.

The night before the exam, prepare your pencils, know your exam centre, and sleep. There is no productive studying in the final hours that outweighs the cost of arriving fatigued.

A Note on Consistency Over Intensity

Three months is long enough to build real competence if you work consistently. It is not long enough to recover from three weeks of doing nothing followed by a desperate sprint. The students who perform best on the TR-YÖS are rarely the ones who studied the most in a single weekend. They are the ones who worked in focused sessions, tracked their errors honestly, and adjusted their approach based on what their practice data was telling them.

The structure of this plan is designed to front-load diagnosis and foundation work, use the middle period for targeted improvement, and use the final period for integration and strategy. Do not compress that sequence. Each phase depends on the one before it.

For a full overview of the TR-YÖS exam format, eligibility, and how Turkish universities use scores, visit the AxoPrep TR-YÖS guide. For structured timed practice in the real format, the TR-YÖS practice tool is available to work through at your own pace.

If you want to talk through your preparation timeline, your target universities, or how the TR-YÖS fits into a broader study-abroad plan, the AxoPrep and Atlas advisory team offers free consultations. Reach out through axoprep.com and speak with an advisor who can help you build a plan around your specific situation, timeline, and goals.