Iran Pre-Internship Medical Exam

It certifies that you have completed the pre-clinical and physiopathology stages of the Iranian medical curriculum to the required standard, so your university can permit you to enter the internship year. It is not a licence to practise independently and it is separate from the specialty residency entrance examination you may sit later.

Single-best-answer multiple choice, one correct option per item. Stems range from a single factual sentence to a multi-line vignette with laboratory values or a described finding. The instructions printed with your paper state the scoring rules for that sitting, so read them on the day rather than assuming.

Both change between cycles, so the only reliable figure is the one published by the assessment centre for your administration, usually announced alongside the exam schedule and carried by your university's education office. Do not plan your pacing around numbers repeated by older students.

The threshold is set centrally for each sitting rather than being a fixed historical number, and some universities add their own conditions, such as a minimum in a particular subject area. Check the current announcement from the assessment centre and confirm any faculty-specific requirement with your education office.

Supplementary sittings exist, but how many you may take, when they are offered, and what happens to your enrolment in the meantime are decided by the assessment centre and your university. A fail normally delays the start of internship rather than ending your course, so ask your education office early about your cohort's rules.

Harder in breadth, easier than a residency entrance test in depth. A block exam tests what you just studied; this tests what you retained across two or three years, in one sitting, under time pressure. Students who kept up with coursework usually need a few months of consolidation, not a rescue mission.

Follow the weights. Give internal medicine the largest block, then surgery, pediatrics, and obstetrics–gynecology, and keep psychiatry, infectious diseases, and community medicine on a fixed weekly slot from the start. Interleave subjects instead of exhausting one at a time, because the real paper mixes disciplines within a single session.

No. Together they account for about a fifth of the paper, and much of that content is rule-based and memorisable, so the return per hour studied is often better than in subspecialty internal medicine. Community medicine especially rewards a systematic pass through epidemiology, biostatistics, and health-system definitions, which many candidates neglect.

Increasingly vignette-based: a short patient scenario followed by a question about the most likely diagnosis, the next investigation, or initial management. Definitional recall still appears, particularly in community medicine and mechanisms of disease, so keep factual review in your plan but practise reading stems carefully.

Answering from pattern recognition without finishing the stem - 'most likely' and 'next step' have different answers. Second is neglecting the small subjects. Third is never doing timed practice, so fatigue causes misreads late in the paper. Reviewing why each wrong option is wrong, not just the correct one, fixes most of this.