Questions English-speaking parents ask us

Does my child have to sit this exam at all?

Only if a school on your list requires it. Selective gimnázium programmes usually do; many other schools admit on primary school grades alone.

Hungarian schools decide for themselves. A school may rank applicants on primary school results only, or on those results plus the central written exam, or on both plus an oral round. Academically selective gimnázium programmes almost always require the written exam. The answer for your family is in the admissions prospectus (felvételi tájékoztató) of each school you are considering, published on the school’s own website in the autumn. If your child is at an international or bilingual school that admits on its own terms, check whether it uses this system at all before doing anything else.

Is the exam available in English, or with a dictionary?

No. There is one national paper, written in Hungarian, and no aids are permitted for the Hungarian paper at all — including dictionaries.

The Hungarian paper tests command of written Hungarian: comprehension of a Hungarian text under time pressure, spelling, grammar and the child’s own writing. The maths paper is presented in Hungarian too, and its word problems are dense. For maths a ruler, compass and protractor are allowed and nothing else — no calculator. For the Hungarian paper, nothing at all.

We moved to Hungary recently. Is a Hungarian prep course realistic for us?

It depends on whether your child can already follow a fast lesson in Hungarian. If not, a group course is the wrong first step.

We would rather lose the booking than take it and watch a child sit silently through eleven sessions. If Hungarian is comfortably your child’s school language, a group course works exactly as it does for anyone else. If it is still the harder of their two languages, the useful sequence is individual work with a Hungarian teacher first, and a group course later — possibly in the following cycle. Call us and describe the situation; we will give you our honest read even when it is not a sale.

Are there any allowances for a child who is not a native speaker?

The published adjustments apply to special educational needs and diagnosed learning difficulties, not to language background, and must be requested in December.

Oktatási Hivatal allows extra time, familiar equipment or exemption from the assessment of specific items only where there is a valid expert opinion (szakértői vélemény) for special educational needs (SNI) or learning and behavioural difficulties (BTMN), and only if the request is submitted together with the exam registration in December. The exam school’s head decides before the exam, and it cannot be reopened afterwards. We are not aware of a separate route based on a pupil’s first language. If your child holds an expert opinion of any kind, ask the exam school in writing, early.

What are the deadlines, and what happens when?

Register for the exam by 1 December 2026, sit it on 23 January 2027, apply to schools by 22 February, hear back by 7 May.

The one thing to internalise is that registering for the exam and applying to schools are two separate acts, months apart, on different paperwork. December is the exam. February is the schools. Neither substitutes for the other. Oral rounds, where a school holds them, fall between 1 and 19 March 2027; provisional rankings appear around 22 March; there is a single window on 6–8 April to reorder your preference list; and enrolment is on 24–25 June. The full sequence, with what you have to do at each step, is on the exam page.

All of these dates come from the published draft of the school-year decree and are expected rather than final. Oktatási Hivatal publishes the binding calendar in late summer or early autumn, and we update these pages when it does.

Where does my child sit the exam, and does the venue matter?

Any school on the published list of exam venues. It does not matter which: the marking scheme is national and every school accepts the score.

The Education Authority publishes the list of exam-organising schools in November. You register directly with the one you choose, and you may sit the exam there regardless of which schools you later apply to. There is a persistent belief that a weaker school marks more generously. It does not work that way: the marking scheme is the same document everywhere, and no other school may re-mark the paper afterwards. Choose the venue you can reach easily at 09:30 on a Saturday.

How much does the written exam count towards getting in?

Where a school counts it, it must be worth at least half the total admission score. An oral round may be at most a quarter.

Hungarian law sets those limits; each school then publishes its own arithmetic in its prospectus, including how it weights Hungarian against maths. Marks brought from primary school therefore cannot exceed half of the total, and behaviour and diligence grades cannot be counted at all. The 50 / 25 / 25 split you will hear quoted is common practice rather than a legal requirement, so read the actual document for each school on your list.

Can we apply to several schools, and does the order hurt us?

Apply to as many as you like. Your order of preference is hidden from schools and cannot cause a rejection.

There is no cap on the number of schools or programmes. You submit one preference list to the Education Authority; the schools rank applicants without seeing where they stand on anybody’s list. Central matching then places your child at the highest school on their own list that ranked them within capacity. Putting an ambitious school first therefore costs nothing — it cannot endanger the safer choice below it. This is the single most useful thing to understand about the Hungarian system, and the one most families from other countries get wrong.

What if my child is ill on the day?

A replacement sitting exists in early February, but only for a documented absence that was genuinely not the family’s fault, and the exam school decides.

In this cycle the replacement date is expected to be 3 February 2027 at 14:00. It is not a second attempt and not a better-score option: a child who sits the January paper cannot sit the February one. If your child wakes up ill on exam morning, contact the exam school immediately and get medical documentation the same day rather than afterwards.

What does preparation cost, and when should we start?

Roughly 60,000 to 211,000 forints depending on format and subjects. September is the right time to start; January is the last useful one.

Our long course runs September to January and is priced from about 73,000 Ft for a single subject online to about 211,000 Ft for both subjects in person, with a four-day January intensive from about 63,000 Ft and an oral workshop from about 60,000 Ft. Prices move with promotions, so read the live figures on the Hungarian pages. Full details of what each course contains are on the courses page.

On timing: the free raw material — every past paper since 2001, with marking schemes — is published by the Education Authority, and a determined family can work through it alone. What a course adds is sequencing, marked work, pace and two mock exams in an unfamiliar building. Whether that is worth the fee is a fair question, and we would rather you asked it in August than in December.