Physics in the Medicine filter semester: what to study

Of the three subjects in the filter semester (the first-semester selection that has replaced the entrance test for Medicine in Italy), Physics is the one students treat worst. Biology gets studied because it is “the Medicine subject”, Chemistry is frightening and so gets faced head-on, Physics is put off until November — and in November you have three exams on top of you. I see the result every year in the first lessons of December: students who can tell you about the Krebs cycle and cannot set up a pressure balance in a pipe that narrows.

The 2026/27 exam sittings are on 10 December 2026 and 11 January 2027, both at 11:00. From today to the first sitting there are thirteen weeks. That is enough, but only if Physics goes into your plan now and not in the middle of November.

What the exam looks like, in practice

Each subject has its own separate test: 50 minutes, 31 questions — 21 multiple choice and 10 completion. There is no logic, no general knowledge, no English: it is a 6-ECTS-credit university Physics exam, and has to be prepared as such. Structure, duration and number of questions are set by ministerial decree DM MUR no. 941 of 10 July 2026 (art. 7); the dates by Directorial Decree no. 249 of 13 July 2026.

The scoring is set by art. 8 of DM 941/2026: +1 for each correct answer, 0 for each omitted, −0.1 for each wrong one, up to 93 points over the three tests; each exam is marked out of 30 and passed with at least 18/30. The 21 multiple-choice questions have five options, only one correct (Annex 2). The penalty is small: guessing at random among five options is worth on average $0.2-0.8\times 0.1=+0.12$ points, so, unlike the TOLC tests (Italian university admission tests) with their −0.25, on multiple-choice questions leaving a blank does not normally pay.

Fifty minutes for 31 questions is a little over a minute and a half per question. It is the figure that should govern the whole preparation, and almost nobody takes it into account: it is not an exam in which you reason out a question from scratch, it is an exam in which you recognise the situation and apply the right relation. If faced with “an ideal fluid flows in a duct whose cross-section halves” you have to stop and rebuild where the continuity equation comes from, you have already lost the question.

If you have not yet tried a timed simulation, the simulation with the structure of the TOLC-MED covers chemistry, biology and physics and is the quickest way to find out how far you are from the pace. You see the correct answer straight away and for free; the guided solution, the one that explains why your alternative was wrong, unlocks with the first lesson.

The syllabus, unit by unit

You do not have to invent the programme: the official Physics syllabus of the Ministry (MUR) for the filter semester is public and defines seven teaching units, each with its weight in ECTS credits (CFU). It is the only document that decides what can come up, and it also tells you where to study more.

Look at the credits column as if it were the distribution of questions, because as a first approximation it is. Mechanics, fluids and electromagnetism alone are worth 3.8 credits out of 6: they are two thirds of the test. If your study plan gives the same time to mechanical waves and to mechanics, the plan is wrong from the start.

Two things need saying about the content. The first is that the slant is biomedical: fluids are not there for fluid physics, they are there for circulation and breathing; electricity is not there for circuits, it is there for potentials and conduction. The second is that the 2026 syllabus assigns each unit a minimum share of practice exercises (between 20% and 30% of the hours). It is a methodological indication written in black and white: this subject is prepared by doing exercises, not by reading.

Fluid mechanics: the unit that decides the exam

I put it first even though it is not the first in the syllabus, because it is where you win or lose. Hydrostatics (Stevin, Pascal, Archimedes), hydrodynamics (continuity, Bernoulli), viscosity and Poiseuille’s law, surface phenomena and Laplace’s law.

The continuity equation says that in a duct the flow rate is conserved:

and Bernoulli’s theorem, for an ideal fluid, that energy per unit volume is conserved:

Poiseuille’s law is the one I expect you to see come up most often, for a precise reason: it is the only one in the block where a fourth power appears, and fourth powers are a gift for whoever writes multiple-choice questions.

The typical question sounds like this: in a vessel the radius is reduced by 20%; at the same pressure gradient, the flow rate becomes…. You do not need to calculate anything, you need to know that the flow rate scales as $r^4$:

A 20% smaller radius is almost 60% less flow. Those who answer “20% less” and those who answer “40% less” (confusing it with the area, which goes as $r^2$) are the two most frequent mistakes I see, and both are among the alternatives.

Mechanics: 1.4 credits, and no shortcuts

Kinematics, dynamics, work and energy, statics. It is the heaviest block and paradoxically the one that students from the science high school skip because “I have already done it”. The level, though, is university level and the questions are drier than those at high school: rarely is there a long problem, often there is a situation described in two lines and four numerical alternatives that differ by a factor of 2 or by a square.

The practical advice: do not restudy it, test it. Do thirty questions, mark which ones you get wrong, and restudy only the pieces that produced mistakes. Those coming from the science high school usually have gaps on work-energy and on the use of signs on the inclined plane, not on kinematics.

Electricity and magnetism

Coulomb’s law, electric field, potential, current, Ohm’s law, capacitors, magnetic field, Lorentz force, induction and the Faraday-Neumann-Lenz law. With 1.2 credits it is on a par with fluids, and with the same applied slant.

The mistake that costs most marks here is not conceptual, it is about units of measurement. The quantities involved in biomedical contexts are small — millivolts, microamps, picofarads — and whoever works in mixed units gets it wrong by three orders of magnitude. Get into the habit of converting everything to SI before writing the formula, not after.

Thermodynamics

Gas laws, heat exchange, heat transmission, first and second law, Carnot cycle, entropy. A full credit, so it deserves attention. The point where most is lost is the sign convention of the first law:

with $Q$ positive if absorbed by the system and $L$ positive if done by the system. Half the mistakes in this unit are a sign, not a concept.

Mechanical waves and radiation physics

Waves (0.4 credits) are the lightest unit: superposition and interference, energy and power carried, intensity as energy per unit area and time. Study it, but last.

Radiation physics (0.6 credits) deserves a discussion of its own, because it is the piece on which most of the novelties of the 2026 syllabus are concentrated: electromagnetic waves and spectrum, radioactivity and types of decay, ionising and non-ionising radiation, geometrical optics. If you are preparing from notes or from last year’s course you risk arriving at the exam without having seen it. Check that your material covers it: it is the only unit in which I have seen students turn up completely uncovered.

Radioactive decay brings with it two relations worth having in your head without thinking:

and the typical question is of the kind “after three half-lives what fraction remains”. Answer: $1/2^3=1/8$, that is 12.5%. There is no calculation, there is recognition — which is exactly the kind of preparation this test rewards.

The mistakes I see repeated

Studying in syllabus order. The syllabus is an index, not a study plan. If you follow the order of the units, you reach December with radiation physics unopened and mechanics revised three times.

Preparing Physics by reading. It is the subject with the biggest distance between “I understood the explanation” and “I can answer in ninety seconds”. The syllabus itself prescribes between 20% and 30% of practice exercises: take that as a floor, not a ceiling.

Ignoring the stopwatch until the last week. Thirty-one questions in fifty minutes can only be handled if recognition is automatic. The first timed tests should be done in October, when there is still room to correct, not on 5 December when they only serve to frighten you.

Treating the three subjects as three separate exams. They are three distinct tests, but the study time is one and the ranking is on the sum. If Physics is your weak subject, the marginal point there costs less than a marginal point in Biology, where you may already be high.

Putting it off to the second sitting. 11 January exists, but it comes after the holidays and after the other exams. Those who aim for it usually arrive less well prepared than they would have been on 10 December.

A realistic plan from now to 10 December

Thirteen weeks. On Physics you can realistically put between four and six hours a week without sacrificing the other two subjects.

Weeks 1–4 (September). Mechanics and fluids, that is 2.6 credits out of 6. Not “revision”: study with exercises from day one. By the end of the fourth week you must be able to set up a Bernoulli problem and a Poiseuille one without looking at the formula.

Weeks 5–8 (October). Thermodynamics and electromagnetism, another 2.2 credits. In parallel, the first timed simulation, even if the programme is not finished: it serves to measure the pace, not the score.

Weeks 9–11 (November). Waves and radiation physics — the two light units, 1 credit in all — and then only mixed exercises. From here on you do not study new topics, you close the gaps that the exercises bring to light.

Weeks 12–13 (end of November / beginning of December). Only timed simulations, one every two or three days, with detailed review of every mistake. No new chapters. The last week is for consolidating, not adding.

Those coming from a high school without physics — classical, human sciences, many technical ones — have to allow two more weeks on mechanics and need to be handled differently: the problem there is not physics, it is calculation with powers and scientific notation, and it is solved before opening the programme. I wrote about it in a guide on typical physics mistakes in high school that applies here too.

How we work in lessons

With those preparing the filter semester I always start from a timed test, even before explaining anything. It serves me to understand whether the problem is content, calculation or pace — they are three different things and are cured differently — and it serves the student to stop estimating their own preparation by feel.

Then we work by syllabus unit and in order of weight, not in index order: mechanics and fluids first, radiation and waves at the end. On each unit the lesson is two thirds exercises commented on while the student does them, because that is where you see the missing automatisms — the sign of the first law, the conversion to SI, recognising that a question about a vessel that narrows is a question about a fourth power.

From mid-November the lessons change shape: they become reviews of simulations. The student does the test alone against the clock, I mark it before the lesson, and in the lesson we look only at the wrong questions and — just as important — those guessed without knowing why.

If you want to place the preparation in its overall context, I wrote a guide on how the filter semester works with dates, structure and ranking, the twin of this post on Chemistry in the filter semester, one on Biology in the filter semester, one on typical stoichiometry mistakes for the chemistry part, and one on cell and molecular biology. The overview of physics as a subject and the other simulations for admission tests complete the picture.

In summary

Physics in the filter semester is 31 questions in 50 minutes on seven units of very different weight: mechanics, fluids and electromagnetism are worth two thirds, waves and radiation one sixth — but radiation is the newest part of the 2026 syllabus and is where I have seen most students arrive uncovered. It is prepared with exercises and with the stopwatch, not by reading, and you start now: from September to early December there is room to do it well, from mid-November there is not.

If you have tried a simulation and did not like the result, or if you come from a high school where physics was not taught, write to me and we will talk about it: the first lesson is to work out where the chain breaks, because missing content, slow calculation and wrong pace are three different problems. Rates (single lesson, 10-hour package) are on the pricing page, payment offline by bank transfer, Satispay, PayPal, card, Apple Pay or Revolut.