KneeSchool/Junior Academy/Choosing Subjects
Choosing Subjects
Page 0.4.1 · Getting Into Medical School · study_skills page
Which subjects medical schools ask for, which ones they only prefer, and how to find the actual requirements for the courses you are interested in.
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What This Is
Medical schools set their own entry requirements. There is no single national list, which is why a page like this one cannot give you the answer and a university prospectus can.
What is consistent across almost all of them is the shape of the requirement. Chemistry and biology sit at the centre of it. Beyond that, schools differ.
Subject choice at sixteen closes some doors and opens others, and a few of those doors are hard to reopen later.
Dropping chemistry is the choice that causes the most trouble. A large number of medical schools require it, and some will not consider an application without it at all. The same is less often true of any other single subject.
How It Works
Requirements are usually written in three layers.
Required. Subjects you must have. Chemistry appears here most often, with biology close behind.
Preferred. Subjects that help but are not compulsory. Mathematics and physics appear here frequently.
Excluded or not counted. A small number of subjects some schools will not count towards an offer. These vary and are published.
The same three layers apply whether you are taking A levels, Scottish Highers and Advanced Highers, the International Baccalaureate, a BTEC in some cases, or an Access course. The names change; the structure does not.
How to Prepare
Work backwards from the courses rather than forwards from your timetable.
Pick five or six medical schools you might apply to. Read the entry requirements for each one directly from its own website. Write down what every one of them requires.
Choose subjects that satisfy all of them, not most of them. Satisfying four out of five means ruling out the fifth before you have even applied.
Then check the Medical Schools Council comparison tables, which bring every United Kingdom medical school's requirements together in one place and are updated each year.
Common Mistakes
Taking three sciences because it looks keen. Medical schools do not reward it, and a fourth subject you enjoy and do well in is usually worth more than a third science you struggle with.
Assuming all schools want the same thing. They do not, and the differences are the whole point of checking.
Reading a requirement from a forum, a league table or a summary page. Requirements change between admissions cycles and only the university publishes the current one.
Leaving the check until the term the choice is due. The useful time to read entry requirements is a year before you choose.
Where to Find Out More
The Medical Schools Council publishes the comparison tables covering entry requirements for every United Kingdom medical school.
UCAS publishes course listings with the requirements each university has supplied.
Each university's own admissions pages are the final word, and where the other two disagree with them, they win.
A school careers adviser or sixth form tutor can check your intended combination against the courses you have in mind.
Key Learning Points
- Medical schools set their own requirements and they differ, so there is no single list to learn.
- Chemistry is the subject most often required outright and the riskiest one to drop.
- Requirements come in three layers: required, preferred, and not counted.
- Choose a combination that satisfies every school you might apply to, not most of them.
- Read requirements from the university's own pages, because they change each cycle.
If any of this sounds like something happening to you, speak to a parent, teacher, coach or doctor.
Explore Further
Where this topic came from and where it goes next in the spiral.
References
No reference list is attached to this draft. Evidence verification has not run, because source retrieval was unavailable at generation time. Under the Operations Handbook a missing reference is acceptable and an invented one is a critical failure, so nothing has been cited. This page carries no entry requirement, test score, fee, deadline or statistic, because those change every year and none could be checked against an official source. Where a figure would normally go, the page points to the body that publishes it instead. Every claim is listed for verification in the accompanying handoff block.
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