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The University of Oxford Medical School offers one of the UK’s most traditional and science-led courses, with a three-year pre-clinical stage leading to a BA in Medical Sciences before you move into the clinical years. Oxford is ranked 2nd in the UK for Medicine in the Complete University Guide 2027 and 3rd out of 40 in the Guardian University Guide 2027, where over 95% of students were satisfied with their teaching.
The University of Oxford Medical School divides its programme into two sections: Year 1–3 is known as the ‘pre-clinical’ and Year 4–6 is the ‘clinical’.
During the ‘pre-clinical’ years, you’ll focus on developing core medical science knowledge, through lectures, practicals and tutorials, to prepare you for clinical medicine. You’ll also obtain a BA (Honours) degree in Medical Sciences. The first five terms are devoted to the First BM, covering the structure and function of the body and the principles of disease, followed by a four-term Final Honour School in which you specialise in eight themes chosen from options such as systems neuroscience, cardiovascular science, pharmacology and signalling, molecular pathology and cancer.
College tutorials are central to the Oxford approach, and you’ll be taught weekly in groups often as small as two, alongside classes of 10 to 50 students and lectures for up to 200. Most pre-clinical teaching takes place in the Medical Sciences Teaching Centre, and clinical relevance is built in from the outset through the ‘Learning with Patients’ course and regular visits to GP tutors.
Anatomy at Oxford is taught without cadaveric dissection. Instead, the pre-clinical course uses practical classes exploring prosections of human cadaveric material, prepared by teaching staff and surgeons from nearby hospitals, living anatomy classes in which you investigate functional anatomy using yourselves as subjects, and computer-assisted learning exercises.
During Year 4–6, your ‘clinical’ years, the majority of your teaching will be delivered within hospitals and general practices, you’ll gain clinical experience, and you’ll achieve your BM, BCh qualification. Clinical teaching is delivered mainly by clinicians from Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust and local GPs, and the clinical years run to extended terms – 40 weeks in Year 4 and 48 weeks in Years 5 and 6. Like all UK medical students graduating from 2024–25 onwards, you’ll need to pass the national Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA) before you can join the medical register.
Your clinical experience will include:
Modules covering the major clinical specialties, currently including:
You can find more information about the clinical placements you'll undertake on Oxford Medical School's website here.
Most clinical teaching takes place in the hospitals and general practices of Oxford, with Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust – including the John Radcliffe Hospital and the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre – providing both a local service and a regional referral centre for specialist treatment. An important element of your training takes place elsewhere in the Oxford Teaching Network, primarily in Northampton, Swindon, Buckingham and Reading, which are busy district general hospitals.
For your Year 6 district general hospital attachment, you’ll be placed at one of the following:
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During your fourth year, you’ll undertake a Special Study Theme, which allows you to explore interests outside of the core curriculum through seminars, small-group teaching and an independent project. Similarly, in your final year, you’ll have twelve weeks (spread throughout the year) in which you’ll complete ‘student selected clinical options’ and ‘special study modules’, grouped into themes such as clinical medicine, clinical and scientific research, community-based projects, management, humanities including foreign languages, and medical education.
Within your final year, you’ll also complete a ten-week elective placement, which allows you to explore an area of medicine of your choice, within the UK or abroad. Most students travel overseas for clinical attachments, some pursue research, and everyone presents a poster or talk at the Electives’ Conference in the final week of the course. Oxford notes that travelling abroad costs on average around £3,000, with applications possible for additional support of usually around £300 to £500 towards travel costs.
Research is built into the Oxford course: every A100 student completes an experimental research project during the BA year, working in one of the many laboratories across the Medical Sciences Division or beyond. Because the BA in Medical Sciences is part of the six-year programme, you graduate with a second degree without taking a separate intercalated year.
Away from the curriculum, Osler House Club is made up of all Oxford clinical medicine students and functions both as a building on the John Radcliffe site and as a society, with gardens, a gym, a kitchen and a bar, plus student-led academic and sporting societies, football and netball clubs, a choir and orchestra, and a close relationship with the fundraising Tingewick Society.
Oxford Medical School offers an accelerated four-year programme for applied or experimental science graduates, with a degree class of 2:1 or above. You can find out more about their ‘Medicine (graduate-entry/ accelerated)’ programme here.
Other selling points you could mention at interview include:
The typical entry requirements for 2027 entry are:
Scottish applicants need Advanced Highers at AA (in Chemistry plus one of Biology, Physics or Mathematics) alongside Highers at AAAAA, and accepted BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma qualifications are listed on the Medical Sciences Division website. You must have reached your 18th birthday by 1 November in the year you start, and the number of international fee status places is capped by the government at a maximum of 14 per year across the A100 and A101 courses. You can check the full details on the course page, and compare schools using our guide to medicine entry requirements.
Widening access: Oxford doesn’t publish a separate contextual offer for Medicine, but says that wherever possible your grades are considered in the context in which they have been achieved, and that a candidate’s school and general background are of no importance. Applicants who narrowly miss the initial shortlist are reviewed by tutors, taking into account any academic or non-academic circumstances that suggest GCSE and UCAT performance underestimate their potential – so it’s important to submit extenuating circumstances through the official process. UK state school students in Year 12 can apply to UNIQ, Oxford’s free residential summer school, which currently runs two Medicine-oriented courses, and STEP inTO OxMED is run by Oxford medical students to support applicants from under-represented backgrounds. Oxford also offers one of the most generous bursary packages in the UK for students from households earning around £50,000 or less, alongside Crankstart scholarships.
The selection process for Oxford Medical School includes interviews at two colleges: where possible one will be your college of choice (or allocation, if you made an open application), and the second will be allocated to you at random. You’ll be interviewed by at least two academics at each college, and by at least one practising clinician across the two interviews. Colleges interview blind of your college choice and your UCAT score, which is only disclosed after they have submitted an initial ranking.
The interviews will assess your personal characteristics which make you suitable for studying medicine, for example your empathy, your ethical awareness and your communication skills, as well as your academic potential, such as your problem solving skills and your intellectual curiosity. You can find more information here.
For 2027 entry, interviews will be held online in December 2026. Oxford’s published timetable states that each shortlisted A100 candidate will be interviewed by two colleges, with the interviews being either on Monday 14 or Tuesday 15 December 2026 (graduate-entry candidates are interviewed on 17 and 18 December). Shortlisting decisions are emailed in late November, and final decisions come from colleges in mid-January 2027. You can check the latest interview timetable on the University’s website.
The majority of UK medical schools include an admissions test as part of their entry criteria, which you must pass before you’ll be considered for interview.
Admissions exam for Oxford: University Clinical Aptitude Test (UCAT)
The UCAT is designed to assess the skills, characteristics and professional behaviours which are needed for medical school. The exam is now divided into 4 subtests: Verbal Reasoning, Decision Making, Quantitative Reasoning and Situational Judgement (SJT). Abstract Reasoning has been removed from the test. You’ll receive a total score of 900–2700 for the three cognitive subtests, plus an SJT band from 1 to 4.
For 2027 entry, the UCAT is being held between 13 July and 24 September 2026. Every A100 and A101 applicant must register for and sit the test – if you don’t, your application won’t be considered further.
Oxford uses the UCAT to build a numerical ranking for shortlisting, alongside your GCSE performance. For GCSEs, tutors look at the number and proportion of passes at grades 8/9 and relate those to the performance of all students at the school where the GCSEs were taken. For the UCAT, they use your overall cognitive subtest score only – your situational judgement score is not used at this stage. Applicants with GCSEs have equal weight given to GCSEs and UCAT, while applicants without GCSEs, with five or fewer GCSEs, or who took GCSEs between summer 2020 and summer 2021 have their UCAT double weighted.
Because Oxford shortlists roughly the same number of applicants every year using two equally weighted variables, there is no UCAT cut-off score: a lower UCAT score can be compensated for by more 8/9 grades at GCSE, and vice versa. Around 425 applicants are interviewed each year – about two to three per place, or roughly 25% of the field – with around 80 extra applicants added to the shortlist after tutors review every non-shortlisted application.
| Latest published admissions statistics (3-year average, 2023–25) | Figure |
|---|---|
| Applicants interviewed | 29% |
| Applicants who were successful | 11% |
| Annual intake | 155 |
Source: Medicine, University of Oxford.
Oxford’s detailed shortlisting statistics page currently still reports the 2023 admissions round, when applicants sat the BMAT rather than the UCAT, so the average test scores published there aren’t directly comparable with UCAT scores.
To achieve the best possible UCAT score you can, and increase your chance of being offered an interview at Oxford medical school, it’s essential that you prepare well. Our adaptive UCAT question bank will help you. Powered by artificial intelligence, it automatically assesses your strengths and weaknesses, and provides questions to specifically develop these areas. This adaptive, personalised learning makes more efficient use of your UCAT revision and avoids wasting time answering questions that won’t develop your learning.
You can also use the question bank dashboard to identify any areas which may bring down your total UCAT score and affect your chances of being selected for interview.
With your calculated skill level, the number of questions you’ve answered correctly, and your response time, you can clearly see which areas you’ve “mastered” and which you need to dedicate more time to.
For more general information about the UCAT, check out our complete guide, which includes UCAT exam dates, fees and a breakdown of the different subtests. And for more preparation help, there’s our step-by-step preparation guide.
You can also see how other medical schools use the test in our guide to UCAT universities.
Tuition fees for students starting in 2027 are:
These are the pre-clinical fees, charged in Years 1, 2 and 3. Fees for the clinical years haven’t been confirmed for 2027 entrants and may be different – as a guide, students progressing to the clinical stage in 2027 pay £10,050 (home) or £69,160 (overseas) a year. You’ll also need to budget for higher living costs in the clinical years, as the terms are longer. Check the course fees page for the latest information.
Good luck with your application to Oxford! For more help, take a look at our guides to applying to medical school and the best medical schools in the UK.
