LEK spring 2026: the English-language cohort scored 23 points below the national average
The Centre for Medical Examinations has published the figures for the February 2026 sitting. Nationally the exam is close to a formality — 96.8% passed. For candidates sitting it in English it is not. This page sets out what the numbers say and, more usefully, why the gap is there.
Where the English cohort sits
Mean score · pass rate · candidates
Nationally, 353 candidates out of 11,030 fell below the pass mark — roughly one in thirty-one. Among those sitting in English, 61 of 334 failed: close to one in five. Add the 911 graduates of foreign universities and you have 1,245 people, 11.3% of the entire cohort, sitting an exam that behaves quite differently for them than the headline pass rate suggests.
Why the gap exists
It is not that the English paper is harder. It is a translation of the same exam. The difference is in what you can prepare from.
Under the amendment of 16 July 2020, 140 of the 200 questions on every LEK paper are drawn from a question base that CEM publishes openly. Polish students work through that base before the exam. It is the single most effective thing you can do — and it is published in Polish.
The required reading has the same problem. CEM publishes a list of textbooks each field is written from — Interna Szczeklika for internal medicine, Bręborowicz for obstetrics, Gałecki for psychiatry. Most exist only in Polish. So the two resources that decide the outcome are both in a language the English-track cohort may not read comfortably.
That is the whole explanation for 23 points. Not ability, not teaching — access.
The part that works in your favour
Questions repeat. In each of the last three LEK sittings, more than nine out of ten questions had already appeared in an earlier session — between 91% and 95%. The exam is not rewritten from scratch; it is reassembled.
So the ceiling on your score is not set by how much medicine you can memorise in the remaining weeks. It is set by how much of a finite, knowable set of questions you have actually worked through and understood.
And the stakes are not passing. With a 96.8% national pass rate, almost everyone clears the 56% threshold. The score itself is what counts, because it feeds directly into the residency ranking. Candidates who had already passed and came back to improve averaged 160.09 — well above the 152.57 of first-time sitters. People re-sit an exam they have already passed, which tells you what the exam is really for.
Where we are with English
A straight answer: the paper described above is already free in English, in CEM's own wording. Our study platform and the wider question bank are still in Polish and we are working through them — the questions are the same questions, so this is review rather than new content.
Free right now: the complete Wiosna 2026 paper in English — 200 real CEM questions with a score and a full answer review at the end. The very session these figures describe.
Source: Centre for Medical Examinations (CEM), LEK statistics for the spring 2026 session. Pass rates per group calculated as passes divided by candidates. Transcription checked against the published totals: the groups sum to 11,030 candidates and 10,677 passes, and the candidate-weighted mean is 157.09 — the national figure exactly. Polska wersja tego tekstu .