Taking the UPCAT at UP Los Baños

The short version

• Your permit has no room on it. It never did. The examiner assigns your seat on the day and you do not get to choose it.
• Download the campus map tonight, on wifi. Not at the gate. Thousands of people will be sharing the same cell towers on the same morning.
• Check which day and which session is yours. The permit carries both. There is a 6:30 am morning session and a 12:30 pm afternoon session. August 1 is a Saturday, August 2 is a Sunday.
• The test runs about five hours. Bring water and snacks, which UP explicitly tells you to bring. Leave your phone and your smartwatch with your parent, because both are banned during the test.
• Watch for the UPLB advisory. The campus-specific instructions (where to report, what time, gates) come from the UPLB Office of the University Registrar and the UP Office of Admissions, usually only days before. They were not out when this page was written.
• Arrive early enough to be lost and still be fine. UPLB is a large, spread-out campus. Walking from one end of the academic core to the other is not a five-minute thing.

What the permit says, and what it does not

Test permits went out in July. Most of the panic on the morning comes from people expecting the permit to be more specific than it is. It is not a seat assignment. It is proof you are expected somewhere.

Scroll sideways for the full table.

Not on the permit

• Your room.
• Your building.
• Your seat.
• Which entrance or gate to use.

The UP Office of Admissions is explicit about this. At test centers that use several rooms or several buildings, the address on the permit is a centralized reporting location. You go there first, and you are directed to your room from there on the day. The examiner assigns seats. Examinees may not choose their seat, their room, or their building.

UPLB is exactly that kind of center. It is a whole campus, so treat the permit as telling you which campus and which morning, and nothing finer.

On the UP Office of Admissions list of UPCAT test centers, the entire entry under Region 4-A (CALABARZON) reads "UP Los Baños, LAGUNA". That is all of it. No street, no building. It is also the only Laguna entry on the list. That page carries no year, so read it as a standing list of centers rather than a confirmed roster for this particular cycle. For scale, the previous cycle used 117 testing centers nationwide.

What time to be there

Read your permit first and follow it over anything on this page. If you need a number to plan around before then, note that the two official UP pages currently disagree with each other:

The sessions themselves start at 6:30 am and 12:30 pm. The bulletin is the page written for this cycle, so plan for 6:00 am or 12:00 nn and treat the earlier arrival as the safe one. Arriving early costs you nothing. Arriving late can cost you the exam.

What to bring, and what is banned

From the UP General Information Bulletin. The test runs about five hours, which is why water and snacks are on the list rather than optional extras.

Bring

• Your test permit, printed. You present it and hand it in to test personnel.
• Your school ID, or any valid government-issued ID.
• At least two good quality pencils.
• A sharpener.
• A rubber eraser.
• Water.
• Snacks.

Not allowed during the test

• Cellphones
• Smartwatches
• Calculating devices
• Cameras

Plan for the phone rule in advance. Decide before you leave the house who holds the phone during the exam, and agree on a meeting landmark with whoever brought you, because you will not be able to call them when you come out.

What last cycle looked like at UPLB

Everything in this section describes the previous exam, held August 2 and 3, 2025. It is here to set your expectations about the shape of the day. It is not a prediction, and none of these buildings or gates is confirmed for 2026. Do not go to any of them because you read it here.

UPLB published a campus traffic advisory for that exam. The useful thing it reveals is structural, and it is very likely to hold again: UPLB does not run the UPCAT in one hall. The advisory marked testing centers at ten separate locations spread across the campus:

• IBS
• CAS (two locations)
• CDC
• IMS (New Math building)
• PHYSCI
• CEAT
• ASI
• EE
• IAS
• CVM

It also named four gates as entrances and exits, and closed a list of interior campus roads for the weekend:

• Main Gate
• Jamboree Gate
• Central Experiment Station (CES) Gate
• Institute of Animal Science (IAS) Gate

UPLB reported welcoming close to 10,000 examinees over those two days. That is the number to keep in mind when you think about traffic at the gate, queues, and whether mobile data will work.

What to take from this. Assume you will be told a building name and sent walking, possibly a long way, and that the road you expected to drive down may be closed. That is the exact situation this app is for. It is also why the building name you are given is worth typing into the search bar the moment you hear it.

Getting to campus and moving around it

Room TBA records two jeepney routes for UPLB, with 27 stops between them. These are the ordinary campus routes, not exam-day arrangements.

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Recorded fare on both routes: 13 pesos regular, 11 pesos discounted. Fares change and the app is not the authority on them. Carry coins and small bills.

Kaliwa and Kanan are the same loop

This confuses first-timers more than anything else on campus. Kaliwa and Kanan are not two different destinations. They are one loop, and the name tells you which way the jeep turns after it enters the UPLB gate. Kaliwa turns left and hits Carabao Park / DevCom first. Kanan turns right and serves the same stops in reverse, hitting Carabao Park / Landbank first.

Practically: if the building you want is early in the Kaliwa order, take Kaliwa. If it is near the end, Kanan gets you there in a few stops instead of most of the loop. If you get it wrong you still arrive, just the long way around, which on exam morning is the difference that matters.

Kaliwa order, from the town side:

1. Olivarez Plaza Mall
2. Robinsons Town Mall
3. Carabao Park / DevCom
4. Raymundo Gate
5. CAP-CSI
6. Sacay
7. Main Library
8. Graduate School / Umali
9. Women's Dormitory
10. Men's Dormitory
11. Baker Hall
12. Animal Husbandry
13. Agronomy Building
14. College of Engineering and Agro-Industrial Technology
15. Senior's Social Garden
16. Headquarters
17. St. Therese / Math Building
18. Makiling School
19. Carabao Park / Landbank
20. Olivarez Plaza Mall

The loop opens and closes at Olivarez Plaza Mall, which is why it appears twice. Kanan runs this list bottom to top.

The Forestry route

A separate route climbing to the upper Forestry campus. Worth knowing mostly so you do not board it by accident, and because the University Health Service sits on it.

1. Forestry Jeep Terminal
2. CEM Jeepney Stop
3. OVCRE Annex Building
4. Narra Bridge
5. Maria Makiling Statue
6. UP University Health Service
7. Forest Biological Sciences Building

Finding a building once someone names it

This is the moment Room TBA is built for. A proctor, a marshal, or a sheet on a wall says a building name. You have never heard it before. You have a few minutes.

Type the name into the search bar. All 52 UPLB buildings in the app carry written walking directions from a person who knows the campus, not generated text. They read like this:

"In front of CAS Annex 1, to the left of SEARCA. Has multiple wings housing the Institute of Biological Sciences and the Institute of Weed Science, Entomology, and Plant Pathology."

"From the main gate, walk towards the Oblation statue. The Physical Sciences Building is the wide building to the right of Oble."

The app also holds 79 name aliases, so the nickname or acronym you were given resolves to the real building. Searching BioSci, AMPED, or Catambay Hall lands on the right pin. That matters when the person giving you directions uses campus slang and you are hearing it for the first time.

Tap the result and the map centres on the building with its pin, so you get both the words and the picture. Both work with no signal if you downloaded the directory.

For the parent who waits

You will be here for hours, on a campus built for 4,000 hectares of agriculture research rather than for waiting. Two things shape the day: it is a weekend, and UPLB is spread out.

Weekend hours are the thing to plan around. August 1 is a Saturday and August 2 is a Sunday. Campus canteens and offices generally keep weekday hours. Room TBA records 49 places but stores no opening hours for any of them, so treat every canteen below as "might be closed" and bring water, food, and something to sit on. Do not build your morning around a specific canteen being open.

Food on campus

Food just outside, near Raymundo Gate

The strip in Batong Malake (locals call the area the Grove) is outside the campus but close to Raymundo Gate, which is a named jeepney stop. More of it is likely to be open on a weekend than the campus canteens are.

Places to wait, and to name over the phone

Pick one landmark and agree on it before your examinee walks off. Building names all sound alike to someone who has never been here. Landmarks do not.

Practical notes. The University Health Service is on the Forestry jeepney route if anyone needs it. Do not plan to walk back and forth across campus during the exam, because the distances are larger than they look on a phone screen. And download the map on your own phone too, not just your examinee's, since you are the one who will be navigating while they are inside.

What no app can tell you, including this one

Being clear about the gaps is more useful than filling them with confident guesses.

Scroll sideways for the full table.

Room TBA is a map of a campus, kept by volunteers. It is good at "where is that building and how do I walk there". It is not the registrar, it is not the UP Office of Admissions, and it is not official. For anything about the exam itself, those two offices are the only sources that count.

Sources

• UP General Information Bulletin for the permit contents, the session times, the arrival times, what to bring, the prohibited items, and the five-hour duration. This is the page that names the August 2026 dates directly, so prefer it over the homepage where the two disagree.
• upcat.up.edu.ph for the centralized reporting location rule and seat assignment.
• UPCAT test centers list, where UP Los Baños appears under Region 4-A. Undated, so treat it as a standing list.
• Inquirer and GMA News for the August 1 and 2, 2026 exam dates.
• UPLB Office of the University Registrar for UPLB campus instructions, when they are published.
• The UPLB OVCCA traffic advisory for the previous cycle (exam of August 2 and 3, 2025) for the last-cycle testing locations, gates, and road closures, and UPLB news for the roughly 10,000 examinees figure. Both describe last cycle, not this one.
• Philstar for the 117 testing centers used in the previous cycle.
• Campus figures on this page come from the Room TBA production database, read on July 27, 2026.