Study Medicine in Europe Without an Entrance Exam

Without an entrance exam: what it means

It means there is no test day. No biology paper, no chemistry paper, no ranking list published three weeks later. The faculty reads your documents and decides.

This is ordinary practice at a number of European medical faculties with English-taught programmes in 2026. They were set up for international students, and an applicant from Dubai, Milan or Hamburg cannot easily fly in for a three-hour paper. So these faculties moved the decision to what every applicant already has: a school record.

One thing stays the same everywhere. You need a school-leaving certificate that qualifies you for university in your home country.

What counts instead

Four things, in most cases:

• The school-leaving certificate. It has to give access to higher education in the country that issued it.
• Biology and chemistry. Faculties look at whether you took them and how you did.
• English. A certificate, or schooling in English.
• Sometimes an interview. Fifteen minutes online about why you want to be a doctor.

I saw early how much weight science subjects carry. At 16 I was at Shrewsbury School in England. Classmates there chose three science A-levels for their last two years, because medical schools read exactly those three lines of the certificate. The same logic applies here.

My assessment: the paperwork is where applications slow down, not the grades. A missing stamp delays more places than a weak mark in chemistry. That is an estimate from our daily work, not a statistic.

Timeline to a place

Plan three to six months from the first document check to the letter of acceptance. Most of that time goes into certified translations and the legalisation of your school certificate. The faculty's own decision is usually the quick part.

Most programmes start in autumn. Some also take students in February, which helps if you decide late. Start with the documents. Everything else waits for them.

Costs

Tuition for English-taught medicine in Europe ranges from about 3,500 euros to more than 18,000 euros a year in 2026. The country makes the difference: faculties in South-Eastern Europe sit at the lower end, Hungary, Latvia and Cyprus at the upper end. Living costs in most study cities in South-Eastern Europe come to 500 to 800 euros a month.

Whether a faculty tests applicants or not has no influence on the fee. The comparison of the lowest-priced locations is in the article on affordable medical schools in Eastern Europe, and the full picture across countries in the guide to studying medicine abroad.

Quality and recognition

The admission method does not touch the diploma. Directive 2005/36/EC requires at least five years and 5,500 hours of training for a medical degree to be recognised automatically in all 27 EU member states. An accredited faculty meets that standard with or without a test at the door.

The proving still happens. It happens in first year. I studied in Sofia, and most of my exams there were oral, one student and one examiner at a table. A good school certificate gets you the seat. Studying gets you through.

A faculty without an entrance exam is not giving anything away. It is giving you the first year to prove yourself.
Marcel Kloos, founder of Medschool Experts

Entrance tests in other countries

To see why this route is attractive, look at the alternatives. In the United States every applicant sits the MCAT, a test day of about seven and a half hours, after a four-year bachelor's degree. In the United Kingdom applicants take the UCAT, a two-hour computer test, before they even apply.

Austria holds its MedAT once a year, in July. More than 15,000 people register for roughly 1,900 places, so about seven in eight go home without one. Italy went the other way in 2025 and replaced the entry test for its Italian-language medical degree with an open first semester, after which a national ranking decides who continues.

Germany has no single test. The school grade decides, and a voluntary aptitude test can improve it. Five countries, five systems. Against that background, a faculty that reads your certificate and gives you an answer is the simplest of them all.

Your next step

Which faculties admit without an exam changes from intake to intake, and it depends on your certificate. We work with 25+ partner universities and know the current rules of each one.

Send us your school-leaving certificate. In a free consultation we tell you where you can start without an entrance exam, and what the place costs. The faculties are on the universities page.