The European Entrance Exams You Can Sit From Home

An entrance exam in Kraków or Pécs is not just an exam. For an applicant in Toronto or Chicago it is a transatlantic flight, a hotel, days away from school or work, and — if the sitting falls outside a visa-free window or requires documents — more administration on top. Repeat that across a shortlist and the cost of *being assessed* can exceed the cost of applying several times over.

The application fees themselves are small where they are published at all: around €24 at the Medical University of Łódź, PLN 100 at Jagiellonian and Lublin, €85 at Pomeranian, up to €300 at Szeged. Set beside a flight, the fee is a rounding error. The travel is the real number, and it is the one nobody puts in the budget — see what it costs just to apply.

Which is why the programs that assess you remotely deserve to be identified as a group. They change what a realistic shortlist looks like from another continent.

These requirement sets state that the written or oral assessment itself is conducted online or remotely.

The top five are the useful ones, because they publish enough to prepare against. Pécs is the most revealing: of its 100 questions, 60 are English — 40 general and 20 medical. That is an exam a North American applicant is unusually well placed to sit, and it is not what most people picture when they hear "entrance exam in Hungary".

Humanitas is the outlier in the other direction. The HUMAT's 60 questions split into 10 scientific thinking, 10 academic literacy, 10 biology, 10 chemistry, 10 mathematics and 10 physics — a broader syllabus than the biology-and-chemistry pattern everywhere else, with physics and mathematics that other exams do not test. Passing it also exempts the applicant from providing a separate B2 English certificate, which removes a document from the chain.

Białystok is effectively an oral exam rather than a conversation — two science subjects, examined live over Zoom. Prepare for it as a test, not an interview.

The two British ones are notable because the UK otherwise interviews in person and at scale: 21 multiple mini interview programs in our data are all British, and an MMI is a circuit of physical stations. Queen's and Cardiff running theirs online are the exceptions within the country least likely to offer one. The wider picture is in the medical school interview in Europe.

One limit matters more than any entry above, so it gets its own section.

A program missing from this list has not been shown to require travel. These sixteen are the ones whose published requirements say the assessment is online. The rest mostly do not say either way. Absence here means the page is silent, not that you will be flying.

That silence is common. Fifty-two requirement sets across the catalog name an entrance exam or admission test of some kind, and only a handful state the format. So the practical move is the same one that works everywhere else in this process: ask, in writing, before you commit. The question is one line — is the entrance exam held online or on campus, and if on campus, where and on what date?

Two related things also worth asking, because they are rarely published: whether a proctoring system is used and what it requires of your computer and room, and what happens if your connection fails mid-exam. A remote exam removes a flight and introduces a different failure mode.

Finally, remote assessment is a cycle-by-cycle policy, not a permanent feature. Several of these moved online in recent years and could move back. Confirm for your cycle rather than trusting this page or any other.

Sit the remotely assessed ones first. They cost the fee and an afternoon. Doing them early gives you real information about where you stand before you spend money on travel — and an entrance exam result is the most honest signal you will get about your chances, far more than any grade conversion.

Group the in-person ones geographically. If you are flying to central Europe anyway, cluster exam dates so a single trip covers several. The deadline calendar shows the dates side by side.

Watch the time zone. An online exam is scheduled in the university's local time, which is usually five to nine hours ahead of North America. A 9am paper in Vilnius is 2am in Toronto. That is a legitimate reason to ask whether an alternative sitting exists, and a genuinely bad thing to discover the night before.

Do not confuse an online application with an online exam. Nearly every program takes applications online, including all twelve Romanian medicine programs on this site. That says nothing about how they assess you. The two get conflated constantly, including in university marketing.

Check what the exam is actually testing. Pécs weights English heavily; Humanitas tests physics and mathematics; almost everyone else tests biology and chemistry. The syllabus differences are wider than the format differences — European entrance exams covers the pattern, and second chances covers what happens if a sitting goes badly.