Studying medicine in PASS and L.AS

Since the 2020 reform, PACES no longer exists. You now enter medical school in France through PASS (parcours d'accès spécifique santé) or through an L.AS (a bachelor's degree with a health option). The principle is still selective: limited places, a ranking, and written exams, most often as multiple-choice questions.

• In PASS, the health major comes with a minor in another discipline (law, biology, psychology…) that you also have to pass: without the year's credits, you cannot apply. PASS cannot be repeated; a student who passes the year can try again through an L.AS.
• In L.AS, the health minor comes on top of a bachelor's degree in another discipline. Your time is split between the two, and the ranking is based on your grades.
• Depending on the university, some students are admitted on their written exam grades, others go on to oral exams, and the rest are not admitted. The written exams remain the way in: that is where most of the work goes.

Three things change compared with high school: the volume (biochemistry, cell biology, anatomy, physiology, biophysics, statistics and public health each bring dozens of pages a week), the time span (what you learn in September is tested in December or May) and the format (an MCQ asks you to recognize the exact detail, fast, without hesitating between two similar options).

Copying a 40-page handout into summary sheets takes a huge amount of time and teaches little. Work directly on the handout:

• Highlight with a color code that stays the same all year: for example yellow for definitions, green for figures, red for the traps pointed out in the lecture hall.
• Add as a note what the professor said out loud that is not written down.
• Write the questions you have on a sticky note, to settle them in tutoring or in practicals.

The annotated handout becomes your single reference. To go further on how to work through a PDF, see our guide to annotating a course PDF.

On the day of the lecture, or the next day at the latest. That is the rule that makes the difference. A card made while the lecture is fresh takes two minutes. A card made three weeks later means rereading everything.

A few examples of good PASS cards:

• Biochemistry: “Rate-limiting enzyme of glycolysis?” (answer: phosphofructokinase 1).
• Cell biology: a cloze text on the stages of mitosis, one blank per stage.
• Anatomy: a diagram of the brachial plexus where the names are hidden one by one.
• Biophysics: a formula with its units, written out properly rather than approximately.

One idea per card, a short answer you can check. If a card asks you to recite a paragraph, split it into three. Our guide to making good flashcards explains these rules in detail.

Through spaced repetition. The idea is old: Ebbinghaus described the forgetting curve as early as 1885, and research on the spacing effect (Cepeda et al., 2006) shows that spreading out your reviews works better than cramming them together. In practice, each card comes back just before the moment you would have forgotten it: the next day, then a few days later, then weeks later.

Day to day, you no longer decide what to review: you do the cards the algorithm shows you each day. Twenty to forty minutes a day, every day, beat whole weekends of catching up. To understand how it works, read our page on spaced repetition.

Cards help you remember. MCQs teach you to answer under real conditions. You need both.

• Always time yourself. Getting a question right in ten minutes when it deserves one is no use on exam day.
• Go back over every mistake: why the option was wrong, which sentence in the handout said so.
• Turn recurring mistakes into cards, so they keep coming back until you have them.
• Sit a full mock exam a few weeks before the exams, to test your stamina.

Our guide to practicing MCQs gives a step-by-step correction method.

Start from the exam date and work backward. Count the days left, remove the ones when you will not study (tutoring, rest), then share out the subjects. Keep the last two or three weeks for MCQs and mock exams, not for discovering new lectures.

The plan does not replace the day's cards: it comes on top of them. Our page on the exam study planner offers a template.

Mnemesia was built for this exact pace, by Raphaël, an engineer and medical student. It works with no account and offline, and your courses stay on your device.

• Your handouts are organized as Years › Semesters › Units › Subjects, in a real folder on your computer. In L.AS, your degree and the health minor sit side by side.
• On the handout: highlighter, pen (Apple Pencil included), sticky notes, and text recognition for scanned handouts. Crop a diagram to turn it straight into an image-mask card.
• Cards (front and back, cloze, image masks) come back through spaced repetition (FSRS). Your Anki decks (.apkg) and Quizlet lists (csv, tsv) import.
• Before the exams, review mixes several decks, and difficult cards can be pulled up in one go.
• MCQs are written by hand (single answer, multiple answers, short answer, figures) or received from a classmate as a file. Exams are timed, scored in points, and each corrected paper keeps its mistakes to go over again. You can sit just part of an exam.
• The planner holds your exams with their countdown, imports your university timetable (.ics) and spreads the workload over the days left. The J method (J0, J1, J3, J7…) places each handout's reviews on it.

Once the competitive exam is behind you, the work changes: no more ranking in 2nd and 3rd year, but teaching units to pass and semiology starting. See our page on studying in 2nd and 3rd year. Later, the clinical years prepare for the EDN, item by item: see studying for the clinical years and the EDN.

The cards you make in PASS are not lost: physiology, biochemistry and anatomy come back everywhere afterward.