How the academic year works in Romanian medical school: term dates, classes, exams, holidays

⏱️ Reading time: 11 minutes · Verified 1 August 2026

Thirty to thirty-five contact hours a week, two exam sessions that carry all the marks, and a start of term that opens with a week of administrative queues.

The Romanian academic year does not look like a Western European pre-med year. It is more structured, more school-like, with far more compulsory attendance — and an assessment logic that is entirely different, which catches new arrivals out in January without fail.

Here is how it runs, month by month, with a real timetable.

---

🗓️ How the year is structured

Two semesters, two exam sessions, and a resit session in September. Dates vary by a few days between universities, but the skeleton is the same everywhere.

Two things to take from that table. First, the teaching periods are short — eleven and fourteen weeks — which makes the pace dense. Second, the exam sessions run three to four weeks: this is not two days of papers, it is a whole month of successive sittings.

---

🎒 Start of term: what actually happens

Term officially opens on 1 October, or the first Monday of October. But your own start of term begins one to two weeks earlier.

The administrative week. This is the step nobody plans for and the one that eats the most energy. You have to deposit the originals of every admission document, sign the study contract, pay the first tuition instalment if you have not already, get your student card made, collect your grade book (carnet de student) and be assigned to a practical group.

Group assignment. This is the detail that structures the whole year. You are assigned to a serie (the lecture cohort) and to a grupă of ten to fifteen students, with whom you will do all of the year’s practicals. Those fifteen people become your real year group: you will see them more than anyone else, and they are who the revision groups that get you through January are made of.

The first weeks of teaching are calmer than what follows. Use them to set up your working method now, not in November: it is the only point in the year when you will have the time.

---

⏱️ The rhythm of classes

Allow 30 to 35 contact hours a week in years one and two, spread over five days, generally between 8am and 6pm.

Two formats coexist, and they do not have remotely the same status:

On top of that comes private study, which is the real hidden volume: two to four hours a day in normal periods, more as the sessions approach. The honest total is around 50 to 60 hours a week in first year — the same order as a Western pre-med year.

---

📋 A real weekly timetable

Here is a typical week from the second semester of first year. Titles and slots vary from one university to another, but the density is representative.

What that table shows, and what appears nowhere in the brochures:

• The days are long but fixed. In September you already know where you will be every Tuesday at 2pm for the whole year. That is very different from the total autonomy of a pre-med year at home.
• Anatomy takes three slots, two of them in the dissection room. It is the subject that structures first year, and the one most people fail.
• Wednesday is lighter. Almost every university leaves a half-day free: it is the most valuable private-study slot of your week, and it is very easily lost.
• Romanian is on the syllabus, even in the English- or French-taught tracks. It is not decorative: it becomes a working tool the moment clinical placements start in year three.

From year three the structure changes: mornings move to hospital placements (often 8am–12pm) and lectures concentrate in the afternoon.

---

📝 Exams and exam sessions

This is where the Romanian system differs most, and where progression to the next year is decided.

There is no meaningful continuous assessment spread across the semester. Almost all of the mark falls during the sesiune, a three-to-four-week period given over entirely to examinations, with no teaching at all.

Two features are worth knowing in advance.

The practical exam is disqualifying in several subjects. In anatomy you are put in front of a specimen and you name it. In histology, a slide. No amount of good writing compensates for a failed identification: it is prepared across the whole semester, in the lab, not the night before.

Orals are routine. Many subjects end with a viva in front of the teacher. For a student used to anonymous multiple choice, that is the real cultural shift — and it is also good news: you can defend a line of reasoning.

The subject-by-subject detail of the formats is in our article on exams in Romania.

---

🎄 Holidays and public holidays

Watch the date of Orthodox Easter: it does not always coincide with Western Easter, and the gap can run to several weeks. Do not book a flight before your university’s official calendar is published.

Romanian public holidays come on top of the vacations:

Two of them fall in the middle of teaching and are worth noting: 1 December, a national day that is widely observed, and 24 January, often right inside the winter exam session.

---

🧭 Getting organised: what works

Treat Wednesday afternoon as a class. It is the most reliable free slot of the week. Blocked out in the library, it is worth two evenings scraped together after 7pm.

Do not fall behind on anatomy. It is the subject that decides first year. The volume is such that a month of backlog cannot be caught up in January — it is paid for in September.

Revise the practical alongside the theory. Anatomical specimens and histology slides are recognised by seeing them repeatedly, not by reading about them. An hour in the lab is worth three hours of notes.

Work with your grupă. These are the ten to fifteen people you will do every practical with. The revision groups that work form in that configuration, not elsewhere.

Treat the session as a month of competition. Three to four weeks with an exam every three days has to be planned backwards from December: which exam on which day, how many revision days in between, and in what order to attack.

Track your practical absences. Keep the count yourself, subject by subject. Nobody will warn you that you are approaching the limit.

Expect the November dip. Dark at 5pm, the novelty gone, the first serious workload. That is when homesickness lands; it is entirely normal, and our article on mental health in medical school explains how to get through it.

What to take away

The Romanian year is more school-like and more supervised than a pre-med year at home: a fixed timetable, compulsory attendance at practicals, oral and practical examinations. In exchange it is predictable — you know in October what your January will look like.

The two things to watch are always the same: absences from practicals, which can shut you out of an exam, and the density of the sessions, which is prepared months ahead.

Going further

Read what first year is really like for working methods, the exam formats for the papers themselves, and student life in Cluj for everything that happens outside the lecture theatre.

---

🛡️ If you would rather not do it alone

Admission is only the first step. We support students through the start-of-term formalities, settling in, and organising the first year — the period where everything is decided.

See how we handle an application →