Jagiellonian University Medicine Entrance Exam 2027: Complete Preparation Guide

Following the official Key Concepts in Biology document's own blocks. Expect a share of these items as arithmetic on a data table rather than as recall.

• Molecular biology (DNA and RNA): the mechanism of replication and control of DNA quality, complementarity, the functional structure of eukaryotic DNA, DNA topology from the double helix up to the chromosome, polymerases as enzymes recognising different gene types, transcription as initiation, elongation and termination, control of transcription, mRNA structure and modification, alternative splicing, types of intron, tRNA structure and specificity, rRNA as the scaffold of the ribosome, and the small regulatory RNAs including snRNA, Y-RNA, siRNA and shRNA
• Gene expression, proteins and enzymes: eukaryotic gene structure and regulatory elements, DNA repair systems, the genetic code and how the genome is read, translation as an interplay of RNAs and enzymes, protein structure and the role of heat shock proteins in reaching native conformation, post-translational modification, cellular and secretory proteins, protein degradation, enzymes in catalysis, regulation of enzyme activity, the reaction centre and substrate specificity, and the general enzyme classes
• Cell biology and signalling: the cell as an open thermodynamic system, biological membranes and the functional differentiation of membrane proteins, the cytoskeleton in intercellular connections, cell movement and tissue organisation, cell junctions and the extracellular matrix, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus and lysosomes, mitochondria, endocytosis, exocytosis and vesicular transport, nucleus and nucleoli, receptors and signalling cascades, ligand types and modes of communication, G-protein-linked and enzyme-linked cell-surface receptors, ion channels and intracellular receptors
• Metabolism: glycolysis and its purpose, anaerobic and aerobic substrates and products, the Krebs cycle and its role in the cell, the respiratory chain and ATP synthesis, and the metabolism of fat and of proteins
• Cell division, genetics and cancer: meiosis and mitosis, crossing over and recombination, the basics of inheritance including genetic and biochemical sex determination, mitochondrial inheritance, mutagens, clastogens, teratogens and carcinogens in carcinogenesis, mutation as a source of genetic instability, proto-oncogenes and oncogenes, the origin of cancer from a single abnormal somatic cell versus an altered stem cell, the evolution of cancer and cancer stem cells, and the immune system's involvement in cancer-cell spread
• Microbiology: virus structure and the viral life cycle, human diseases caused by viruses, the prokaryotic cell and the differences between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, bacterial structure, growth, physiology and genetics, human diseases caused by bacteria, the mode of action of antibiotics, and human parasitic disease including malaria, worms, flukes and ectoparasites
• Anatomy, physiology and embryology: nerve cell structure, resting and action potentials, synapses and neurotransmitters, organisation of the vertebrate nervous system including reflexes and the autonomic divisions, skeletal, smooth and cardiac muscle, sarcomeres and the sliding filament model, skeleton, cartilage, ligaments, tendons and bone, epithelial, endothelial and connective tissue, endocrine glands, hormones and negative feedback, sensory reception including hearing and vision, the four-chambered heart and the pulmonary and systemic circulations, blood composition, haematocrit, haemoglobin and coagulation, innate and adaptive immunity, the digestive, excretory and respiratory systems, skin, nails and hair, the male and female reproductive systems and gametogenesis, and embryogenesis from fertilisation through cleavage, blastula, gastrulation, germ layers and neurulation

From the official Key Concepts in General Chemistry document. Calculation runs through most of it, and since JUMC publishes no calculator rule, practise all of it by hand.

• Atomic structure and bonding: the periodic table, electronic configuration of the s- and p-block elements, protons, neutrons, electrons, the valence shell and valence electrons, isotopes, cations and anions, the types of chemical bonding, Lewis structures, molecular geometry and polar molecules
• The mole, formulas and nomenclature: atomic mass and the atomic masses of isotopes, the atomic mass unit and molar mass, the number of moles and the Avogadro constant, inorganic oxides, hydrides, acids, bases and salts, IUPAC nomenclature of inorganic compounds, and molecular formula versus weight-percentage composition
• Solutions, stoichiometry and gases: the definition of solubility and solubility calculations, percentage concentration, mole fraction, molarity, balancing chemical equations by mass and by charge, synthesis, analysis and exchange reactions, reactions of oxides and the formation of acids and bases, salt formation and neutralisation, reaction yield, the limiting reactant, alloys, standard and normal conditions, calculations based on the Clapeyron equation, and isothermal, isobaric and isochoric transformations
• Acids, bases and aqueous equilibria: the equilibrium constant, its definition and calculation and the direction in which it shifts when conditions change, the auto-ionisation of water and the pH scale, the hydronium ion and the hydroxide anion, electrolytic dissociation of weak acids and bases with Ka and Kb, strong and weak electrolytes, the degree of dissociation, and poorly soluble electrolytes with the solubility product Ksp
• Redox and electrochemistry: oxidation numbers, balancing redox equations, identifying the oxidant and the reductant, redox potentials, the Nernst equation, the electrochemical series of metals, galvanic and voltaic cell potentials, and the standard hydrogen electrode
• Thermochemistry and thermodynamics: calculations based on Hess's law, the heat of reaction, the enthalpy of formation and of combustion, exothermic and endothermic reactions, entropy and the sign of a change in disorder, and Gibbs free energy and spontaneity

From the official Key Concepts in Organic Chemistry document. Structural and stereochemical items are the ones most likely to carry a drawn or written formula.

• Organic structure and functional groups: sp3, sp2 and sp hybridisation and the molecular shapes they give, the carbon atom and its properties in organic compounds, carbon skeletons with single and multiple bonds, conjugated systems and aromaticity, functional groups and heteroatoms, structural and skeletal formulas, and Lewis structures with formal charges
• Classes of organic compound: alkanes, alkenes, alkynes and aromatic compounds, homologous series, alkyl halides and nitro compounds, alcohols, phenols, ethers, aldehydes, ketones, carboxylic acids and their derivatives, primary, secondary and tertiary alcohols and amines, amines, amino acids, peptides and proteins, lipids, fatty acids, soaps, waxes and micelles, carbohydrates from the trioses to the polysaccharides including aldoses, ketoses and the pyranose and furanose forms, and the heterocyclic bases, nucleotides and nucleic acids
• Organic nomenclature: naming hydrocarbons of the various classes, compounds with one functional group and compounds with more than one, identifying the parent chain and stem name, the suffix for the principal functional group, lowest locants, and alphabetical ordering of substituents
• Isomerism and stereochemistry: structural isomers, tautomers and resonance forms, stereoisomers, Z/E stereoisomers, cis-trans isomers, chirality, enantiomers and diastereomers, Fischer projections, and conformations and conformers
• Organic reactions and mechanisms: addition, substitution and elimination, nucleophilic substitution and nucleophiles, elimination mechanisms, electrophilic substitution in aromatic compounds and electrophiles, radical substitution, radical processes and radicals, carbocations, oxidation and reduction in organic chemistry including the oxidation of primary and secondary alcohols, rearrangements, the characteristic reactions of functional groups such as amide bond formation, acetal creation and ester formation and hydrolysis, and organic polymers

The logic content follows the official Key Concepts in Logic document. The arithmetic, algebra, counting and probability are derived from the 2025 sample paper, which contains items of that kind; JUMC publishes no mathematics syllabus.

• Number series and numerical reasoning: the common series pattern types, arithmetic and geometric progressions, first and second differences, alternating and interleaved series, ratios and proportions, percentages and successive percentage change, and averages
• Formal logic and syllogisms: the four categorical statement forms (all, no, some and some-not), syllogisms tested by Venn reasoning, logical deduction, separating a necessary conclusion from a merely possible one, conditional statements, contrapositives, and necessary versus sufficient conditions
• Statements, assumptions and causation: statement and conclusions, deciding whether a conclusion definitely follows, statement and assumptions, identifying the unstated premise an argument depends on, cause and effect, distinguishing correlation from causation, and answering strictly from the given text
• Direction, seating and arrangements: direction tests tracking position and facing through moves and turns, straight-line distance by the Pythagorean theorem, linear and circular seating layouts, and building an arrangement from clues by fixing the strongest clue first
• Verbal reasoning and data interpretation: critical interpretation of written information, reading values, trends and comparisons from graphs, charts and tables, drawing conclusions from data, computing differences, percentages and rates from a figure, and resisting over-reading of the passage
• Problem solving and exam mathematics (derived from the sample paper, not an official list): translating a word problem into an equation and solving it, linear and simple quadratic algebra, work-rate and mixture problems, counting arrangements and selections including rectangles in a grid, and elementary probability of independent and mutually exclusive events

Derived, not official. JUMC names Ethics as a tested area and publishes no syllabus, no subtopics and no sample items for it. The five blocks below are standard medical-ethics preparation: prudent coverage of a named area, not a published scope. Expect short scenarios that turn on applying a principle, and keep jurisdiction-specific law out of your revision, since the exam is sat by candidates from everywhere.

• Core principles of medical ethics: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice, what each principle protects, and the scenarios in which two of them pull in opposite directions
• Consent and capacity: consent that is informed, voluntary and given by a patient with capacity, the information a patient must receive, capacity as decision-specific and assessed by understanding, retaining, weighing and communicating, refusal of treatment by a competent adult, and why an unwise choice is not the same as incapacity
• Confidentiality and privacy: the duty of confidentiality, the narrow grounds on which a disclosure can be justified such as a serious and specific threat to an identifiable person, and disclosing only the minimum necessary to the appropriate parties
• Truth-telling and professional conduct: honesty with patients and the limits of therapeutic silence, breaking bad news, professional boundaries, conflicts of interest, and responsibilities towards colleagues and the profession
• Justice and resource allocation: fair allocation of scarce resources, triage by clinical need, equity of access, and the difference between clinical criteria and social judgements about a patient's worth

It's the entrance examination Jagiellonian University Medical College uses to select candidates for its six-year English-taught Medicine in English programme in Kraków: 100 multiple-choice questions in 180 minutes, five options per question with exactly one correct answer, covering four areas: Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics/Logic and Ethics.

It's specific to Jagiellonian. There is no shared national Polish medical entrance test: every Polish university writes and times its own paper for international applicants, and across the five Polish schools IvyTest covers the question counts alone run from 12 to 100. Preparation built for another Polish school does not transfer cleanly here.

Online. JUMC's Admission Criteria page states that the entrance exam sessions for 2026/27 are held online, with the details sent to candidates whose registration is confirmed, and its Course overview says the examination is conducted online and takes place in May/June. The exam is in English. The same caution applies to the calculator: JUMC's published pages say nothing about one, so practise without it and check the rules sent with your session details.

JUMC does not publish a marking rule. IvyTest opened four official university pages and the Senate's recruitment rules on 28 September 2026 specifically to settle this and none of them states whether a wrong answer scores zero or carries a deduction; that's a confirmed absence, not a failure to find it. What is published is that the paper has 100 questions and the ranking list is ordered on a result expressed on a 0 to 100 scale, which is what one mark per question produces. IvyTest carries +1 correct / 0 incorrect / 0 blank as the neutral assumption. Practically it changes little: a blind five-option guess is worth +0.2 points under that scheme, and even a −0.25 penalty would make it exactly break-even, so there is no case for leaving a question blank.

Two numbers matter. The Rector sets a minimum result each cycle, by the day the first ranking list is published; a candidate below it is refused even if places remain. For Medicine in English it was 57 of 100 in 2023, 61 in 2024 and 40 in 2025, by Jagiellonian University's admission statistics. Above it you need a place on the ranking list: the last candidate qualified in the first round scored 57.00, 61.00 and 63.00 in those years. There is no per-subject floor.

JUMC doesn't say, and this is the single largest gap in what it publishes about its own paper. The exam description names the four tested areas and the material-scope page lists four topic PDFs plus a sample paper, with no counts and no weighting anywhere. Be careful with the 25/25/25/25 split you'll see quoted elsewhere: that's arithmetic (100 ÷ 4), not a university figure. Since you can't know which area is heaviest, even coverage isn't a compromise here, it's the correct strategy.

Carefully, because JUMC publishes no syllabus for it. Ethics is one of four named tested areas and is described as assessed like the sciences, through problems based on text analysis, but there's no key-concepts document, no subtopic list and no sample ethics item. In practice that means preparing the reasoning rather than the content: the four principles (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice), consent and capacity, confidentiality, truth-telling and professional conduct, and resource allocation, applied to unfamiliar vignettes, and kept free of any one country's law, since the candidate pool is international.

No interview: admission is on the entrance examination result alone, with no separate document-scoring stage. The exam is in English. Polish for Medicine is a required course in years 1–4 of the study plan; teaching and exams are otherwise in English.

One hundred and twenty places on the Medicine in English programme for 2026/27, on the university's recruitment portal. The university states no acceptance rate as such, but its admission statistics give applicants per place: 558 applicants for 130 places in 2025 (4.29 per place, 126 enrolled), 497 for 125 in 2024 (3.98, 103 enrolled) and 402 for 125 in 2023 (3.22, 114 enrolled). Applicants count every paid application across all rounds.

Within the EU, yes, under the EU's automatic recognition of medical degrees, but Poland's entry asks for more than the diploma. Annex V of the EU Directive on professional qualifications lists the Polish lekarz diploma together with the certificate of the LEK (Lekarski Egzamin Końcowy), Poland's national final exam, and the certificate of completing the postgraduate internship (staż), so the LEK matters beyond practising in Poland itself. The UK applies the same list: under the Medical Act 1983 (section 21B), a doctor of any nationality who holds it can register with the GMC without the knowledge test other international graduates sit, while a graduate without the LEK and the internship goes through the UKMLA. US-bound graduates need ECFMG certification via USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 CK, the same requirement every international medical graduate faces.

Yes. The IvyTest simulator runs JUMC-format practice (100 questions, five options with exactly one correct answer, the full 180-minute block) in timed, tutor and review modes, with per-area analytics across all four tested areas and a free diagnostic available without payment.

JUMC publishes no past papers. Its Examination Material Scope page links one PDF, Sample questions 2025: 17 questions on 9 pages, 7 in Biology, 8 in Chemistry and 2 in Logic (the PDF asks you to ignore their numbering), with no answer key and no Ethics item. The same page links the four Key Concepts PDFs, the official topic lists for Biology, General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry and Logic. The practice questions on this page are IvyTest's own.

Neither was published on 11 October 2026. JUMC's Course overview page says the exam is held online in May/June, and the Senate adopted the 2027/28 recruitment rules on 27 May 2026. In the last cycle applications ran from 23 February to 29 April 2026 (12:00 CEST), the exam was a single online session on 23 May 2026 at 16:00 CEST and the ranking list came out on 1 June 2026.

A school-leaving certificate that qualifies you for university where it was issued (predicted grades are accepted with a signed school statement), Chemistry and Biology or Physics courses with grades, and proof of English: secondary education taught in English, IELTS 6.5 or TOEFL iBT 87, or set English grades for Scandinavian candidates. The 2027/28 rules list IELTS 6.5, TOEFL iBT 87 or CAE. Then the entrance exam. No medical work experience is needed.

€16,000 a year for students admitted in 2026/27, the same in all six years (€96,000 in total), up from €15,500 for 2025/26 admissions; 2027/28 fees were not yet published on 11 October 2026. Tuition is charged to every candidate and can be paid in two instalments: in the first year, within 7 days of completing registration and by 15 February. The application fee is PLN 100, and JUMC offers no scholarships to international students.

Six years and at least 360 ECTS, ending in the title of Lekarz, which JUMC gives as the equivalent of an MD. Year one is basic science (anatomy, physiology, biochemistry) with clinical skills and a summer clerkship; year two moves to pathology, pharmacology and ethics; from year three, bedside teaching in Jagiellonian University hospitals (Internal Medicine, Surgery, OB/GYN, Paediatrics). Each of the first five years ends with a summer clerkship, and the sixth is clinical training only.

By JUMC's own Academic Program page, it is the oldest medical school in Poland and has been repeatedly recognised as the best medical university in Poland. Its School of Medicine in English has taken international students since 1994, final-year students can take electives in the United States, Canada and elsewhere, and graduates can apply for residency in the US, Canada, Australia, England, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Poland. The pages read give no ranking position.

Yes: Jagiellonian University Medical College's School of Medicine in English, in Kraków, teaches the six-year Medicine and the five-year Dentistry programmes entirely in English (its four-year MD for graduates, which took admissions until 2018/19, is closed). For the university's other programmes in foreign languages, JUMC's FAQ points to the full list on the Jagiellonian University website.

In Kraków, Poland. The School of Medicine in English is at ul. św. Łazarza 16, 31-530 Kraków; its office is open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 8:00 to 16:00 (Thursday is for internal matters, no visits), and admissions information is given Monday to Friday from 8:00 to 15:00. Jagiellonian University's own seat is at ul. Gołębia 24, 31-007 Kraków.

Yes: r/JagiellonianUni, where Jagiellonian University Medical College applicants ask each other about the Jagiellonian University Medicine Entrance Exam and share how their preparation is going. It is run by the IvyTest team. Dates, rules and results come only from the university's own pages, listed under Official sources on this page.

r/JagiellonianUni