Free. No signup. Official 2024-25 figures.

ESAT score converter

There is no official table from marks out of 27 to the 1.0–9.0 scale, and any site handing you one is guessing. UAT-UK sets the scale after the test, from the cohort that sat it, and has never published the raw conversion for any form.

What converts exactly is the score itself. Put a scaled score in below and see where it landed among the 11,919 candidates who sat the ESAT for 2025 entry. Put marks in instead and you get the honest range they could be worth, which is wider than you would like.

Marks

out of 27

Estimated scaled score

5.9

could be 4.5 to 7.3

Which would sit

Top quarter

14% of Mathematics 1 candidates scored in a higher band. The median is 4.2 and the top 10% starts at 6.7.

Candidate sharePlausible range

This one is an estimate, and the range is the point. UAT-UK does not publish raw-mark conversion tables, so this is modelled from the official 2024-25 distributions: a 27-item Rasch curve whose spread is fixed by the raw-score standard deviation implied by Table 17, and whose difficulty centre is assumed. Shift that assumption from an easy form to a hard one and 17/27 moves from 7.3 to 4.5. Nobody can narrow that without knowing which form you sat.

Is that score competitive for your course?

A conversion answers where one module sits. The question students usually mean is “Is $6.5$ competitive for Cambridge Engineering or Imperial Physics?” Build the complete required-module profile below. Where a university publishes no offer-holder figure, the comparison says so.

Cambridge and Imperial, course by course

What did typical offer-holders score?

Choose your course

Cambridge · 2027 entry

Engineering

Mathematics 1, Mathematics 2 and Physics.

Mathematics 1

6.5

Top quarter. Top quarter from $5.4$ ; top tenth from $6.7$ .

Mathematics 2

6.5

Top quarter. Top quarter from $5.5$ ; top tenth from $6.8$ .

Physics

6.5

Top quarter. Top quarter from $5.6$ ; top tenth from $6.8$ .

Your score vs the field

Required-module mean

Your mean

6.5

October cohort middle

4.5

October top tenth

7.0

The honest answer

There is no honest Cambridge offer-holder number to put beside your $6.5$ module mean.

$3$ of your $3$ selected scores reach the top quarter of their published module fields. Cambridge calls a strong test performance usually necessary for interview, but publishes no course average or cut-off.

All three modules are fixed. Cambridge says a strong admissions-test performance is usually needed for interview, then reads the scores with the rest of the application.

Cambridge admissions-test policy 2027 module requirements

Imperial publishes a department-level sum of required module scores. The per-module figure shown here is that sum divided by the number of required modules. It is our arithmetic for readability, not a second Imperial statistic and not a UAT-UK overall score. Sources checked 6 August 2026.

Why marks cannot be converted

Three things get in the way, and all three come out of the technical report itself.

The scale is set afterwards. ESAT modules are post-equated, meaning the whole conversion is worked out once the testing window has closed and every paper is in. Nobody, including UAT-UK, knows what a mark is worth on the day you sit it.

There was more than one paper. Several forms of each module ran across the testing days so candidates could sit on different dates, and equating exists precisely because those forms were not equally hard. Your 17 is worth whatever your form was worth, not what someone else’s 17 was worth.

And the table that would answer it is not printed. The report says plainly that item difficulties are used to build a raw score to ability table, then publishes the scaling that comes after it and not the table itself.

The same Mathematics 1 marks, converted five times over. Only one thing changes down the rows: what the median candidate is assumed to have scored on the paper. Everything else is held at the value the report implies.
If the median candidate got	11/27	14/27	17/27	20/27
10 out of 27	4.9	6.1	7.3	8.6
12 out of 27	4.1	5.3	6.5	7.8
13.5 out of 27	3.5	4.7	5.9	7.2
15 out of 27	2.9	4.1	5.3	6.6
17 out of 27	2.1	3.3	4.5	5.8
Swing	2.8	2.8	2.8	2.8

A swing of 2.8 is a third of the entire scale. A 17 out of 27 is either a 4.5, which is dead average, or a 7.3, which is inside the top 10%, and the published data does not say which. That is the real answer to “what is 17 out of 27 in ESAT”, and it is why the tool above gives you a range.

The conversion UAT-UK does publish

Once a candidate’s ability estimate is known, the rest is a straight line. The scaled score is the module’s constant plus its multiplier times that ability, capped at 1.0 and 9.0. Table 3 of the report gives both numbers for all five modules, and they check out: feed the median Mathematics 1 candidate’s ability of 0.3669 into the line and it returns 4.5000, feed in the 90th percentile at 2.1081 and it returns 7.0000.

Module	Constant	Multiplier
Mathematics 1	3.9732	1.4358
Mathematics 2	5.1806	1.9636
Physics	4.4874	1.8034
Chemistry	4.1340	1.7689
Biology	3.6151	2.0865

The multiplier is why the modules are not comparable. A Biology ability point is worth 2.0865 scaled points and a Mathematics 1 ability point only 1.4358, so the same jump in ability shows up as a bigger jump in the Biology score. What the table cannot give you is the ability estimate itself, which is exactly where the raw marks would have come in.

For what the resulting scores actually mean, see what a good ESAT score is. For how little time you get per question, see ESAT timing.

Sources

UAT-UK ESAT Technical Report 2024-25 (PDF): Pearson VUE for UAT-UK. Post-equating and the raw score to ability table, page 6. Scaling constants, Table 3, page 7. Ability anchors, Table 2, page 7. Percentiles, Table 5, page 9. Binned distributions, Figures 1 to 5, pages 9 to 11. Raw score reliability and standard error, Table 17, page 34.

UAT-UK, Test Results: the score scale, and the statement that UAT-UK provides no grade boundaries or pass mark.

UAT-UK, about the ESAT: 27 questions in 40 minutes per module, no pass or fail, no penalty for a wrong answer.

The estimated range in the tool is ours, not UAT-UK’s. It comes from a 27-item Rasch model whose item spread is set by the raw-score standard deviation implied by Table 17, with the form’s difficulty varied across the span shown in the table above. We publish the range rather than a single number because the published data supports a range and nothing tighter.

UniGenius is an independent study resource. We are not affiliated with UAT-UK, Pearson VUE or any university.

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