YOUR ULTIMATE GUIDE
ENGAA Results - The Definitive Guide to your ENGAA Score
Written by: Matt Amalfitano-Stroud
Please be aware that, as of 2024, the Engineering Admissions Assessment (ENGAA) is no longer being used by the University of Cambridge. Cambridge applicants for Natural Sciences, Engineering, Veterinary Medicine and Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology will be required to sit the Engineering and Science Admissions Test (ESAT).
Your Cambridge Engineering application is dependent on a few different factors; your personal statement, your interview performance and, of course, your ENGAA Score. The ENGAA is a tough exam, so you’re going to have to work hard to get a good score. But what exactly is a good ENGAA score and how is the exam even marked? This guide will explain all of this to you and show you results from previous admissions cycles, so let’s get started!
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HOW IS THE ENGAA SCORED?
The ENGAA marking system isn’t too complicated, but it’s still important to understand what your final score means. So, let’s find out!
The Engineering Admissions Assessment’s (ENGAA) marking system is naturally based on the format of the exam. As you should know already, the ENGAA is made up of two sections, Sections 1 and 2. Section 1 is made of two parts which cover Standard (Section 1A) and Advanced (Section 1B) Maths and Physics, while Section 2 just contains Advanced Physics questions. There are 20 multiple-choice questions in each part of the ENGAA, totalling 60 questions across the exam, each of which is worth one mark.
When the ENGAA is marked, they will initially calculate a raw mark, which is simply the number of questions you got right out of 20. Each part is marked and recorded separately, so you will receive three separate scores from the exam. Once the raw mark is determined for each part, your final ENGAA scores will be calculated using the relevant Conversion Table. These tables will convert your raw mark onto a scale between 1.0 (low) and 9.0 (high). Once again, you will receive three separate scores, which will be the scores sent to Cambridge for your application. Let’s take a look at the tables from the ENGAA paper for 2022 Entry:
ENGAA Score Conversion Table 2022 Entry
Section 1A
| Raw Mark | Converted Score |
|---|---|
| 0 | 1.0 |
| 1 | 1.0 |
| 2 | 1.0 |
| 3 | 1.0 |
| 4 | 1.0 |
| 5 | 1.6 |
| 6 | 2.1 |
| 7 | 2.6 |
| 8 | 3.1 |
| 9 | 3.6 |
| 10 | 4.0 |
| 11 | 4.4 |
| 12 | 4.9 |
| 13 | 5.4 |
| 14 | 5.9 |
| 15 | 6.4 |
| 16 | 7.0 |
| 17 | 7.7 |
| 18 | 8.7 |
| 19 | 9.0 |
| 20 | 9.0 |
Section 1B
| Raw Mark | Converted Score |
|---|---|
| 0 | 1.0 |
| 1 | 1.0 |
| 2 | 1.0 |
| 3 | 1.0 |
| 4 | 1.3 |
| 5 | 2.3 |
| 6 | 3.2 |
| 7 | 4.0 |
| 8 | 4.8 |
| 9 | 5.5 |
| 10 | 6.3 |
| 11 | 7.0 |
| 12 | 7.8 |
| 13 | 8.5 |
| 14 | 9.0 |
| 15 | 9.0 |
| 16 | 9.0 |
| 17 | 9.0 |
| 18 | 9.0 |
| 19 | 9.0 |
| 20 | 9.0 |
Section 2
| Raw Mark | Converted Score |
|---|---|
| 0 | 1.0 |
| 1 | 1.0 |
| 2 | 1.0 |
| 3 | 1.3 |
| 4 | 2.2 |
| 5 | 2.8 |
| 6 | 3.4 |
| 7 | 4.0 |
| 8 | 4.5 |
| 9 | 5.0 |
| 10 | 5.5 |
| 11 | 6.0 |
| 12 | 6.5 |
| 13 | 7.0 |
| 14 | 7.5 |
| 15 | 8.1 |
| 16 | 8.8 |
| 17 | 9.0 |
| 18 | 9.0 |
| 19 | 9.0 |
| 20 | 9.0 |
How do these conversion tables work though? Basically, the conversion table for each year’s exam paper is calculated by Cambridge Assessments Admissions Testing (CAAT), where they will determine the conversion based on the difficulty of each part and previous years’ results. What this means is that some parts will have higher or lower conversions than others, meaning you may need more or fewer points to get a higher score. This is most clear when looking at the top of the scale, where we can see that, to get a score of 9.0, an applicant would have had to have gotten 18 marks for Part A, 14 for Part B and 17 for Section 2.
This isn’t to say that Part B is the easiest in the exam though, quite the opposite in fact. The score requirements are lowered to account for more difficult questions, so scoring 14 marks in Part B is roughly equivalent in difficulty to scoring 18 in Part 1 (although this isn’t a definitive measurement). Since all applicants are sitting the same paper, the conversions here won’t play any major factor in your preparation; you won’t even know these conversions until well after the exam! Not to mention, getting a 9.0 is very uncommon anyway, so don’t be expecting to get that score easily.
When Do ENGAA Results Come Out?
From November 29th in 2023, applicants who sat the ENGAA will be able to view their results online. Your chosen college at Cambridge will have seen them soon after you sat the exam, so this release date doesn’t play any part in your application. It’s purely for your own benefit to see how you performed.
How Do I Get My Results?
Your ENGAA results will be made available to view in the form of a PDF Document. Access is restricted to you via the CAAT Results website, so you will need to register to view them:
- On the day of the test, you will be given a Confidential Results Information sheet that contains your PIN. This will be required to view your online results document.
- This PIN will be needed to register yourself into CAAT Results Online. The PIN acts as your proof of identity, but you will also need to provide further personal details to register.
- The results won’t be available to access here until the confirmed release date.
- On the day of release, you will be able to access your Statement of Results as a PDF document. This document will show your final ENGAA Scores for each part of the test. Note that there will be no additional information regarding your application on this document.
Does Cambridge Have an ENGAA Cut-Off Score?
No, Cambridge does not have an official cut-off score for the ENGAA. This does not mean that the ENGAA score does not play a major part in the decision-making process, however. It simply means that there is no score at which your application will be automatically rejected, the admissions team will still view your grades and personal statement regardless of performance. They are still going to favour higher scores though, but what exactly counts as a good ENGAA score?
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WHAT IS A GOOD ENGAA RESULT?
The whole point of sitting the ENGAA is to get a good score, but it would be helpful to know exactly what a good ENGAA score is. So let’s discuss what you should be aiming for.
Despite there being no cut-off score for the ENGAA, you are still going to want to get to a certain level in order to be comfortable with your performance. There’s no such thing as a definitively “good” result for the test, but many sources would agree that 6.0 – 6.5 is the score that will give you a good chance of earning your offer. This matches with claims that those who score in the top 1/3 of the applicants will have the best chance of success in this highly competitive course, which makes sense in reality. While other aspects are also considered, it’s fair to assume that applicants who perform well in the test will also have high-quality personal statements and do well in their interviews.
How did we land on this figure though? It’s pretty simple really, the answer can be found by looking at the average results of previous years’ applicants! We’ll be checking out the Historic ENGAA Results in the next section of the guide, so we’ll go further into this data then!
What If I Get a Bad ENGAA Result?
So we know now what a good ENGAA score is, but what happens if you fall below this? As we’ve already said, no score is an automatic death sentence for your application, even a 1.0! However, the lower your score gets, the more difficult it’s going to be to get an offer. The key to recovering from a bad ENGAA result is to ensure every other aspect of your application is as strong as possible:
Personal Statement:
This is the first of three major components that you’re going to have to prepare for your application, meaning you won’t have sat the ENGAA before you submit this. However, it’s still important to ensure this statement is as well written as possible as it’s one of the major deciding factors as to whether you are invited to interview. If your writing demonstrates your skills, understanding and passion for the subject, the admissions teams may be more inclined to give you a chance if your ENGAA result was on the lower end.
Grades:
This is the least important part of your application in the current process, so top-tier grades, and especially predicted grades are unlikely to boost your chances after a poor ENGAA performance. Predicted grades have been de-emphasised heavily since the COVID-19 Pandemic, meaning good grades are basically essential for your chances and will not set you apart from the competition.
Interviews:
The interviews are not guaranteed at this stage in the application, so your personal statement and UCAS application will need to be very strong in order to get you an invite. As with many Cambridge applications, you will be required to attend two interviews over the course of two days on various dates from early to mid-December. Your ENGAA result may play a small role here, but mostly this time is all about you showing the admissions team why you deserve a spot at Cambridge. It will be tough, but if you can present yourself as a truly exceptional applicant you may find that your ENGAA result is not as important to the team.
Succeeding in any or all of these things is not a guarantee of success, just like a perfect ENGAA result is not. But having a consistently strong application around your low ENGAA score could be your saving grace when it comes to the decision-making process. There’s no point in giving up over one mistake, as you still have chances to redeem yourself and get that offer!
Can I Resit the ENGAA?
You cannot sit the ENGAA more than once within the same year. Therefore, you’re going to have to reapply for the course in the following exam cycle if your ENGAA score prevents you from getting an offer or interview invite. To avoid the same mistakes, you should tackle your preparation differently in order to improve your chances of success. The most effective way to prepare is with ENGAA.Ninja, which offers tonnes of amazing features to boost your ENGAA score, including tutorials, practice questions and mock exams. You can try out hundreds of practice questions right now by signing up for free!
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HISTORIC ENGAA RESULTS
Now we have a general sense of what you should be aiming for in the ENGAA, let’s take some time to look at how applicants performed in previous admissions cycles.
The ENGAA has been running since 2016, meaning there should be a fair amount of data to look through. However, the data for the early papers of this test does not seem to have been published publicly. As well as this, the ENGAA undertook a format change in 2019, meaning a new scoring system was put in place, the one that is being used now. Due to this, the data from years before this may not be as useful for your own preparation, so we’ll only be focusing on data as early as 2020 Entry.
In 2022, CAAT published a collection of score distribution charts for all applicants who sat the 2021 ENGAA for 2022 Entry. Let’s take a look at that data first:
ENGAA Score Distributions (2022 Entry)
Section 1A - Maths and Physics
Section 1B - Advanced Maths and Physics
Section 2 - Advanced Physics
What does this data show us then? Well firstly, we can see that the peak of each distribution curve sits around the 4.0 mark, meaning a score in this range was the most common. This is the sort of trend we would expect to see from an admissions test like this, as the aim of the conversion scale is to create an average score in the centre.
However, there is one very obvious outlier here that shows an error may have been made when creating the conversion rates. In Section 1B, there was a large spike of students who achieved 9.0, making it the most common score with around 13% of applicants achieving it. Of course, this isn’t normal for an admissions test, as we can see from the other two graphs.
One explanation for this could be that the questions were too easy in this part of the paper, but it seems unlikely that this would be the case considering they are designed as advanced questions. They would surely be designed to be comparatively harder than the Section 1A questions, which we can see the results of which follow a normal distribution curve.
If we look back at the Score Conversion Table for that year though, the answer becomes clear. This table features a very low threshold for achieving a score of 9.0, at just 14 marks (less than 75% of the questions). This doesn’t mean that the questions were too easy, but it means that more skilled applicants would be able to get that many questions correct, leading to a 9.0 score. It’s likely that the assessment development team will have learnt from this mistake in time for the 2022 ENGAA for 2023 Entry, so getting a score of 9.0 probably won’t be so easy this time!
Moving on from this year though, let’s go back a bit further to see what the average results looked like for successful applicants for 2021 Engineering Entry:
Average ENGAA Scores (2021 Entry)
Section 1A
Minimum – 3.2
Maximum – 9.0
Average – 6.7
Section 1B
Minimum – 1.0
Maximum – 9.0
Average – 7.5
Section 2
Minimum – 1.0
Maximum – 9.0
Average – 6.5
This is extremely valuable data to have as it shows us the average score that needed to be achieved to gain an offer in that year. With that in mind, an average score of 6.5 -7.5 falls relatively in line with our original estimation of 6.0 – 6.5 as a good score. Of course, achieving a higher score will always be better though, so aiming to match or surpass these averages should give you a much better chance of success.
Also useful though are the minimum and maximum scores for each section. The maximum scores aren’t too surprising as scoring full marks or close to full marks is far from impossible if you’re skilled enough. However, we can see that two of the three sections have a minimum score of 1.0, which is the worst possible score you could achieve. Of course, there will be applicants that don’t do well in the ENGAA, but remember that these are the averages of successful applicants!
So how is this possible? Firstly, we need to remember that there isn’t a cut-off score for the ENGAA, so no result is a cause for automatic rejection. But it still seems surprising that someone with a score this low would be seriously considered for a place. One potential option could be that the score represents an applicant who did not sit in the ENGAA. This is very rare, but occasionally an applicant may be allowed to apply without the exam due to extraordinary circumstances.
In reality, we don’t have an answer to how this happened, so you shouldn’t go in expecting to still have a good chance of success with a low score. It can happen, but it’s pretty rare!
For 2020 Entry, we have even more data to dig into! As well as the average ENGAA Scores of all offer-holders for each section, we also have the raw marks to see how applicants generally did!
Average ENGAA Scores (2020 Entry)
Section 1A
Minimum – 1.9
Maximum – 9.0
Average – 6.1
Section 1B
Minimum – 1.0
Maximum – 9.0
Average – 6.2
Section 2
Minimum – 1.0
Maximum – 9.0
Average – 6.4
Average Raw ENGAA Marks (2020 Entry)
Section 1A
Minimum – 7
Maximum – 20
Average – 14.5
Section 1B
Minimum – 0
Maximum – 20
Average – 11
Section 2
Minimum – 2
Maximum – 20
Average – 11.2
The average ENGAA scores from this year are roughly the same as we’ve already seen (although slightly lower) and the minimum/maximum scores are basically the same also. What is interesting to see though is how many marks you would need to get to achieve the average score. Section 1A has the highest requirement, which is to be expected as it is the easiest of the three. Achieving 11 out of 20 marks in the other two sections doesn’t seem as challenging as you might have thought though. That’s not to say it’s easy, but it proves that applicants aren’t expected to get every question correct in the ENGAA!
If you’re stuck on deciding which college you should apply to, this data from the same year may help guide you:
Average ENGAA Scores by College (2020 Entry)
While this data is from a few years ago, the general principles that we can gain from it should still be applicable to applications for next year. We can see that there is a mixture of colleges that accepted applicants with very low scores and more average scores as a minimum, while most colleges also had applicants that achieved 9.0. Here are a few other interesting observations:
- Christ’s College have the highest overall average score with 7.3
- Wolfson College have the lowest maximum score accepted with 4.0 in Section 2
- Only two colleges accepted applicants who scored 0.0 (both were on Section 1B)
This is all a lot of data to take in, but we believe that having this context in the exam will give you leg up against the competition, as you’ll have a better understanding of what you need to achieve and what other people are likely to achieve. There’s even more data available online, so we recommend doing some research to find the information you want to learn about!
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WHAT TO DO AFTER YOU GET YOUR RESULTS
With all of this information, the only thing to consider now is what will happen after you’ve gotten your results.
So we now know that your results will be given to you in mid-January, but the ENGAA isn’t the last part of your application. If you are invited to interview, your next job will be to impress the admissions team with your knowledge of the subject and your genuine interest in the subject over the course of two meetings. These interviews will be in a traditional panel format, so you’ll be face to face with some of the tutors who will decide your fate (or less dramatically, your offer at Cambridge). Before the interview, the college you have applied for may suggest some reading to be done before the interviews, but this isn’t the case for everyone.
The interview is the last direct aspect of your application though, so once this is completed all you have left to do is wait for your results and continue your academic studies, which should now be prepping you for your final exams. When we say wait for your results though, we don’t really mean your ENGAA results. Although receiving the results will give you a slight indication of your chances of success, there’s nothing that can be done to actually affect your application at this point so know the result doesn’t hold much purpose. What you’re really going to be waiting for is the final decision.
You will receive your final decision from Cambridge via email, which will confirm whether or not you have received an offer, either conditional or unconditional. Although dates can vary, you can roughly expect to receive this in late January, which is pretty early in the cycle. Depending on the result, you will have various things that need to be done:
Successful Applicants:
If you’ve received an offer, the first thing to do is to hop onto your UCAS account to accept it, assuming you wish to attend Cambridge. You will have the option to confirm this offer as either a firm acceptance or an insurance acceptance. Although you likely will not have received decisions from all your options at this point, it is still worth accepting the offer if Cambridge is your primary choice. If you do plan on waiting though or just haven’t decided yet, you will have until either June 6th or July 24th to confirm your choices, depending on when your last option responds to you (these dates are for 2024 Entry).
After this, all that’s left to do is meet your predicted grades. Whether you got a conditional or unconditional offer, it is still important to perform well on these exams as poor results could have a negative impact in the future.
Unsuccessful Applicants:
If you were rejected by Cambridge, there are still things that can be done. First of all, you will need to wait for responses from your other options. If you receive offers from other universities, then the same process as above applies, assuming you wish to attend one of them. For applicants that are set on Cambridge though, or did not receive any offers, your options are limited.
Cambridge allows for applicants to make complaints regarding the application process, which could result in a re-evaluation of your application if it is found that the process was unfairly skewed against you or otherwise discriminatory towards you. However, these cases are very rare and most applicants will not have any ground to request an appeal. This just leaves one option, reapplying the following year. Applications at UCAS won’t open until early September, so you will have plenty of time to get the grades you need in your exams and work on your application preparation. If this is the route you choose, the best advice is to get some help this time around. This could be from a peer, a mentor, or by utilising a preparation service such as ENGAA.Ninja, which provides a platform of support to guide you through the exam process.
That covers just about everything you need to know about the ENGAA results. If you have yet to take the ENGAA, the best thing you can do now is build up your knowledge of the exam further. You can utilise our ENGAA Starter Guide if you’re just starting out, or plan out your preparation schedule with our ENGAA 6-Month Timeline. Whatever you do next, we wish you the best of luck with the test!
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