The rate in writing, first
Before the first session you have the figure for your case in writing, and nothing is added to it afterwards.
Round 3 of TCAS reads a TGAT score next to your GPAX, and TGAT1 is the English inside TGAT. We prepare for it one tutor to one student, on paper, because TCAS70 is sat on paper.
TGAT1 āļāļēāļĢāļŠāļ·āđāļāļŠāļēāļĢāļ āļēāļĐāļēāļāļąāļāļāļĪāļĐ is the English Communication paper inside TGAT, the general aptitude test āļāļāļ. runs for TCAS admission. Thai-programme applicants sit it in āļĄ.6, and the score feeds round 3, Admission, alongside GPAX. It is a different exam from TCAS A-Level 82 āļ āļēāļĐāļēāļāļąāļāļāļĪāļĐ, and different again from IELTS.
Key Points
The paper is the same either way. What changes is whether the tutor crosses Bangkok to reach you or meets you on screen after school.
The tutor comes to the house and works a timed paper set in the room with you, marking it while you can still remember why you chose each answer.
The same session over video, with the paper set printed at your end so the pencil work stays real, and the marking done live on the call.
TGAT1 has one sitting window in the cycle, so the useful question is never whether to start but where the student is standing when they do.
Nothing about TCAS is decided yet, and that is exactly why English grows fastest here. A student who reads and talks in English through these two years walks into āļĄ.6 with the paper already half-prepared, and the āļĄ.6 year freed for the subjects that need cramming.
Focus Areas:
Teaching resumes in the middle of May, and the TCAS70 Portfolio round opens on 15 August 2569 (2026). English work here does two jobs at once: it builds the TGAT1 score for later, and it strengthens anything English-facing that goes into a portfolio now.
Focus Areas:
Term two opens in early November and the sitting lands inside it, on 30 January - 1 February 2570 (2027). This is the crowded stretch: school assessment and TGAT preparation share the same weeks, so sessions get shorter, tighter and more often about timing than about new material.
Focus Areas:
The score is fixed the moment the paper is handed in; the choices are not. The Quota round opens on 13 March 2570 and Admission runs 7-11 May 2570, with 12-13 May added, through mytcas.com and up to ten choices. Work shifts to reading the score honestly and ordering the list around it.
Focus Areas:
Six strands, and each one is either about English you can use or about the paper in front of you on the day.
The item count, the timing and the weighting for TGAT1 are set by āļāļāļ. in the Test Blueprint published for each TCAS cycle, and they live at mytcas.com. We build the timing plan from the blueprint for TCAS70 itself, and we read it with you. A number printed here today could quietly belong to a cycle that has already closed, and a student would be practising to the wrong clock without ever knowing it.
An hour spent on the map saves a term of preparing for the wrong thing.
The paper is named āļāļēāļĢāļŠāļ·āđāļāļŠāļēāļĢāļ āļēāļĐāļēāļāļąāļāļāļĪāļĐ, English Communication, and the name is the syllabus describing itself.
Most marks lost under time pressure are lost by reading everything at the same speed.
Word lists memorised in isolation fade by the sitting; words met in sentences tend to stay.
TCAS70 returned TGAT, TPAT and TCAS A-Level to paper-based testing, and paper has its own skills.
The same university can be reached by two English routes, and they ask for different evidence.
Four situations, and the sessions look different in each one because the calendar sitting behind them is different.
The straightforward case. TGAT is part of the score that round 3 reads, and TGAT1 is the English inside it, so the paper is simply on the list of things that must be done well.
Recommended:
The most comfortable place to be. English answers to time. Pressure does much less for it, and a student who begins in āļĄ.5 spends āļĄ.6 sharpening what is already there.
Recommended:
A Thai-language programme and an international programme at the same university ask for different English evidence. These students prepare for TGAT1 while an IELTS or SAT date sits on the same calendar, and the two plans have to be written together or they collide.
Recommended:
A student sitting TCAS again already knows the room and the pencil. What they usually need is a clear account of where the previous score came from, so the second attempt is a genuinely different attempt. Repeating the first one louder tends to produce the first result again.
Recommended:
There are no dashboards and no scores invented to fill them. There is the paper the student worked on and a plain account of how it went.
What the session covered, what the student handled well, and the one thing to look at before the next session. Written by the tutor who was in the room.
A photo or scan of the actual answer sheet, so the parent sees the working and not a summary of it. Kept across sessions, which is how a pattern becomes visible.
Items carried forward until they stop coming back wrong. Nothing is marked as mastered because a lesson was delivered; it is marked when the student gets it right cold.
How many sessions remain before 30 January 2570, what is planned for them, and where school assessment weeks sit in the way. Updated when either side of it moves.
None of these are about the student's English. They are about the wrong exam, the wrong medium or the wrong month, and every one is cheap to fix early and expensive to fix in January.
Why it happens
The word English attaches to four different things in Thai admissions: TGAT1, TCAS A-Level 82 āļ āļēāļĐāļēāļāļąāļāļāļĪāļĐ, the O-NET English paper, and the IELTS or TOEFL score an international programme wants. They arrive in different months and reward different work.
How we fix it
First session starts with the programme list. The textbook waits until we know which exams are genuinely on it. Once we know which doors the family is walking through, the exams on the calendar sort themselves out and some of them come off it.
Why it happens
TCAS70 returned TGAT, TPAT and TCAS A-Level to paper-based testing. An app rewards tapping and instant feedback; the sitting rewards reading a printed page, tracking a row on an answer sheet and self-checking without anything lighting up green.
How we fix it
Papers get printed, even in an online session. The student works in pencil, fills the sheet properly, and the tutor marks the scan on the call. Screens are for explaining afterwards.
Why it happens
TCAS moves. The papers went digital and came back to paper. The TGAT sitting moved out of December and into late January. The fee for TGAT and TPAT1-5 was removed for TCAS70. Any one of those makes an old summary quietly misleading.
How we fix it
We read the āļāļāļ. Test Blueprint and the calendar at mytcas.com for the cycle the student is actually in, with the family in the room, and we date everything we write down.
Why it happens
O-NET has been voluntary since āļāļĩāļāļēāļĢāļĻāļķāļāļĐāļē 2563, and āļāļāļ. stopped using it for TCAS selection from TCAS65. At āļĄ.3 and āļĄ.6 it has moved to digital testing. It is a different paper, taken for different reasons, and it is no longer part of the admission score.
How we fix it
The O-NET result is useful as one more data point about the student's English. It is never used as the baseline. We sit a TGAT1-shaped paper early and work from that number instead.
Why it happens
The sitting falls on 30 January - 1 February 2570 (2027), which is inside term two of the Thai school year. School assessment is happening in the same weeks. There is no quiet month left to build English in, only weeks in which to defend it.
How we fix it
Work that changes a score, reading and vocabulary in use, is scheduled for āļĄ.5 or term one. January sessions are reserved for timing, paper technique and the errors the student already knows they make.
Why it happens
Both are English, both belong to TCAS, and the two names get used interchangeably in conversation. They are separate papers with separate codes and separate dates: the TCAS A-Level papers in TCAS70 run 13-15 March 2570 (2027), six weeks after the TGAT sitting.
How we fix it
We write the exam name, the code where it has one, and the date on the plan, in that order. If a student needs both papers, they get two lines on the calendar and two different kinds of session.
Every line here is about how the work is run, because a brand that has taught nobody in Thailand has no results to point at and should not pretend otherwise.
Before the first session you have the figure for your case in writing, and nothing is added to it afterwards.
If the pairing is wrong, you say so and we change it. No argument, no fee, no waiting for a term to end.
What was covered, what held, what did not. Short enough that it actually gets read on a weeknight.
Exam dates, codes and rules on this page come from āļāļāļ. and from the TCAS70 calendar, and we say which cycle they belong to so you can tell when they age.
No tutor counts, no success rates, no score guarantees. When Thailand results exist they will be counted from records, and until then the page stays quiet about them.
There is no group class behind this page. The whole session belongs to the student sitting in it.
Edulom has not taught a student in Thailand yet, so there are no names, no photographs and no counts to show you here. What we can show you is the filter itself, which is the thing that will decide who sits down with your child.
One tutor, one student, over video on Asia/Bangkok time, with the paper printed at your end so the pencil work stays real. Online is the practical answer for families outside Bangkok and for anyone whose weekday evening cannot also hold a journey.
In Bangkok a tutor comes to the house, and we match along the BTS or MRT line the family already uses. A session on a school night lives or dies on the commute, and a district boundary tells you very little about that. The provinces beside the city, Nonthaburi, Samut Prakan and Pathum Thani, are matched the same way. We have not started teaching in Thailand yet, so no area is listed here as covered until a tutor is genuinely available for it.
The same handful comes up every cycle, usually in this order.
TGAT is the general aptitude test in the Thai admission system, run by āļāļāļ., and it comes in three parts. TGAT1 is āļāļēāļĢāļŠāļ·āđāļāļŠāļēāļĢāļ āļēāļĐāļēāļāļąāļāļāļĪāļĐ, English Communication. TGAT2 is āļāļēāļĢāļāļīāļāļāļĒāđāļēāļāļĄāļĩāđāļŦāļāļļāļāļĨ, critical and logical thinking. TGAT3 is āļŠāļĄāļĢāļĢāļāļāļ°āļāļēāļĢāļāļģāļāļēāļ, future workforce competency. A student sits them together, and TGAT1 is the one that decides how much English weight they carry into round 3.
The names matter more than they look. The paper is called communication, and that is the syllabus describing what it is interested in: whether a reader can tell what someone means, catch the tone of a request, pick the natural reply. A student who has drilled grammar rules and never had to work out what a speaker actually wants tends to find the paper stranger than their school marks would predict.
One thing this page deliberately does not tell you is how many items TGAT1 contains or how long you get. Those are set by āļāļāļ. in the Test Blueprint published for each cycle, and they live at mytcas.com. Tutoring sites print them from memory and go stale quietly, which is a small lie that costs a student real timing practice. We read the blueprint for the cycle the student is in, with the family, and write the timing plan from that.
Planning forwards from today produces a plan that feels reasonable and finishes late. Planning backwards from the sitting produces a plan that fits.
The fixed points in TCAS70 are these. The Portfolio round opened on 15 August 2569 (2026). The TGAT papers, TPAT2-5 beside them, occupy 30 January - 1 February 2570 (2027). TPAT1 āļāļŠāļāļ lands on 13 February. The TCAS A-Level subject papers run 13-15 March 2570, with registration 14-20 January. The Quota round opens 13 March 2570. Admission runs 7-11 May 2570, with 12-13 May added, through mytcas.com. Direct Admission runs 29 May to 15 June 2570.
Lay the Thai school year over that and the squeeze becomes obvious. Teaching starts in the middle of May, the year ends in March, the first term closes around the last week of September, and the second opens in the first days of November. So the TGAT sitting falls inside term two, in the same weeks as school assessment, and the TCAS A-Level papers land just before the school year ends. The months that are actually free for building English are the ones nobody thinks of as exam months: āļĄ.5, and term one of āļĄ.6.
The sitting moved out of December and into late January for TCAS70, to reduce the disruption of problems in previous years, flooding among them. That shift is worth noticing for a practical reason: it moved roughly six weeks of preparation out of the school holidays and into a school term.
Practical Tips
A Thai university can often be entered by two quite different routes, and each one asks for a different kind of English evidence. This is the single most expensive thing for a family to discover late.
The Thai-language route runs through TCAS. The student sits TGAT, including TGAT1, and possibly a TCAS A-Level subject paper such as 82 āļ āļēāļĐāļēāļāļąāļāļāļĪāļĐ, and those scores sit next to GPAX in round 3. The international-programme route runs on its own selection, and reads IELTS, TOEFL, SAT, CU-TEP, IB or Cambridge A-Level results instead. MUIC will take IELTS Academic at band 6.0 where Writing itself reaches 6.0, TOEFL iBT 69 carrying Writing 22, PTE 50, or Duolingo 100. Chulalongkorn's CommDe will read a CU-TEP score of 80, a TOEFL iBT of 79, an SAT EBRW of 450, or IELTS at 6.0.
The skills overlap, and the exams do not. A student can be genuinely strong in the English that TGAT1 rewards and still be short of an IELTS writing band, because one of them never asks for an essay. Preparation that treats them as the same subject spreads itself thin across both and arrives underprepared for whichever one comes first.
So the first question in a first session is not a diagnostic. It is the programme list. Once we know which door the family is walking through, half the calendar usually comes off the page, and the sessions get considerably more useful.
A session opens with the paper from last time. New material waits its turn. The student says why they chose the answers that were wrong, and quite often the reasoning turns out to be sound and the reading was rushed, which is a completely different problem, and it needs a completely different session.
The middle of the session is new work, and it is worked in pencil on a printed set, because TCAS70 sits on paper. An answer sheet gets filled in properly, including the row-tracking that costs marks when it goes wrong quietly. In an online session the set is printed at the student's end and photographed for marking on the call, so nothing about the medium changes.
The session closes with marking done while the student is still in the room. The point is not the score. It is that the student can still remember what they were thinking twenty minutes ago, which is the only moment a correction really lands. Then the tutor writes the note that goes to the parent that evening, and adds anything still shaky to the list that carries forward.
As the sitting gets closer the shape tightens. Full papers under the real clock replace mixed practice, the vocabulary work moves to whatever the student has actually been getting wrong, and the last sessions before 30 January are about pacing and nerves rather than about English.
Practical Tips
Other programs that might suit you
Tell us which āļĄ. year the student is in and which programmes are on the list. We will come back with what a first TGAT1 session would cover, which exams actually apply to that list, and the rate in writing, before anyone books anything.