the 5 hardest exams in the world

in front of me I have five of the hardest exams in the world some of these exams take years to prepare for and others you can't prepare for some of them test your pure knowledge While others test your creative and original thinking and one of these exams the one that I'm most excited to talk about at the end of this video has a median score of zero in this video we're going to dive into each of these exams and what makes them so special we're going to look at the structure of these exams the kinds

of questions that are on them and how students tend to do first up on our list is the us mle the United States medical licensing examination now I got stressed just reading about this one if you're one of my viewers who plans to become a doctor one day I applaud you because it is not an easy process the USMLE is a three-step Examination for medical licensure in the US in other words it's what you need to take in order to become a doctor now the US mle is different from the MCAT the MCAT is what

you take to get into Medical School the US mle is what you take after you get into medical school and Tech techically this exam takes years to complete because you don't take it all at once it consists of three stages or steps as they call it most students will complete step one which covers basic science knowledge at the end of their second year in medical school they'll take step two which covers clinical knowledge during their fourth year in medical school and they'll take step three which covers patient management after they graduate usually during their first

year in residency each of these steps is a very intense and lengthy exam Step One is an 8h hour exam that consists of 280 multiple choice questions covering topics like Anatomy biochemistry microbiology and many other areas if you're in high school I want you to Simply imagine spending the entire school day taking the most intense exam of your life got that cool now add 1 hour because step two is a 9-hour exam that consists of 318 multiple choice questions oh and in step two we're not dealing with basic science Concepts anymore now we're getting asked

about things like internal medicine surgery and Pediatrics now if you're feeling tired I need you to stay awake because step three is an 18h hour exam that you take over the course of 2 days step three is all about applying your medical knowledge in the real world it consists of 412 multiple choice questions and 13 computer-based simulations to walk you through different patient scenarios let's look at some sample questions so this packet right here contains sample questions for step one and what you'll immediately notice is that these questions are long I don't think I've seen

a multiple choice question this long in my life so this question right here asks you about a 14-year-old boy who's experiencing knee pain it gives you a lot of information about the patient and then it asks which of the following factors in this patient's history most increased his risk for developing this condition is it as BMI family history medication use previous fractures or recent physical activity and you'll very quickly notice that every single question has a very similar structure a blanky old patient comes to the office for these reasons and has has these symptoms lots

of the questions also come with images and fair warning some of them are kind of graphic now step two questions look pretty similar on the surface because the question structure is almost the same but instead of asking about basic biology Concepts these questions ask about medical Knowledge and Skills now step three again very similar question structure but these are more geared towards the decision-making process in patient care on the screen now you can see some sample questions each of these three exams is out of 300 points in 2021 the average scores were 231 247 and

227 respectively and these three steps have surprisingly High Pass rates of 91% 98% and 98% respectively which I guess makes sense because these students were smart enough to get into medical school in the first place however if you want to hear about an exam that doesn't have as high of a pass rate look no further than the je India's engineering entrance exam the je is required for admission to various engineering colleges in India including the coveted iits the Indian Institutes of Technology more I looked into this exam the more grateful I felt for not needing

to take this so the je consists of two parts je Main and Je Advanced if you do well enough on the main you'll qualify for the advanced and the advanced is what you need to do well on if you want to get into the iits so the main consists of three papers paper 1 paper 2 a and paper 2 b Paper 1 is required of all candidates and test them on their knowledge of physics math and chemistry 2 a and 2 B are optional depending on what you want to study each paper is a 3-hour

exam that consists of multiple choice questions and numerical questions now je Advanced on the other hand only consists of two papers each paper is a three-hour online exam that consists of numerical questions and multiple choice questions that focus on physics math and chemistry so now how difficult is the je well to give you some perspective 1.5 million students take the main each year and only 10% qualify for advanced and then of the people who take Advanced only 25% of them qualify and get into an IIT in other words roughly 2.5% of the original test takers

as former IIT Deli director Ram gopal ra once said the exam is tricky and complicated because it is designed to eliminate people or to reject candidates not to select them let's take a look at a few sample questions just to see how tricky and complicated it truly is first we're going to look at je Main and right off the bat we're dealing with integrals and you know as I'm looking at this I can't help but think about the dozens of people that DM me each month saying that the SAT is nothing compared to the je

and now I see why for comparison let me show you the first math question on a practice SAT exam what is 10% of 470 now to be fair the digital sat is adaptive meaning the questions do get harder but this comparison is still hilarious anyways let's take a look at a couple more math questions we have some algebra we have some geometry we have some probability and actually let's try to answer this question right here A Pair of Dice is thrown five times for each throw a total of five is considered a success if the

probability of at least four successes is K over 3 to the 11th then K is equal to what 82 123 164 or 75 I actually want you to pause this video and try to solve this problem yourself okay so first we have to figure out the probability of a success that is the probability that a pair of dice sums to five we can roll a one and a four a two and a three a three and a two or a four and a one that's for four possible ways out of 36 total meaning that our

probability of success is 1 nth and our probability of failure is 8 9ths now let's call these values p and Q now the question is asking us about the probability of at least four successes so in other words the probability of four successes or five successes and to get that value We'll add the probability of four successes to the probability of five successes now to calculate those two probabilities we have to calculate the binomial distribution formula which I will not dive into here but if we simply plug the numbers in we get that the probability

of at least four successes is 5 CH 4 * p 4 * Q + 5 CH 5 * P 5 which gives us 41 over 3^ 10 which is equal to 123 over 3 ^ of 11 meaning that K = 123 so the answer is 2 now we glossed over a lot of the math there but I just wanted to show you how involved these questions can get and that was just question number two by the way now let's quickly look at some example physics problems we're dealing with electromagnetism Digital Electronics fluid dynamics these questions

span almost every major area of physics and same goes for the chemistry questions right on the first page we have Solid State chemistry electrochemistry organic chemistry these questions make AP chm seem not too bad and before we jump on to the next exam let me show you some je Advanced questions as well like je main this exam covers math physics and chemistry though as expected the questions are a lot trickier speaking of tricky questions next up we have the gaow whereas the je is India's undergraduate admission exam the gaow is China's held in June every

year the galow is a 9-hour exam taken by 13 million high school students over the course of 2 to 3 days the exam focuses on Chinese math and a foreign language and students must choose between the Arts track or the science track the Arts track will further test examinees on History political science and geography whereas the science track will test them on physics chemistry and biology now what makes the gaow so difficult well unlike the SAT which has multiple administrations throughout the year the galow is only held once per year most Chinese students will only

have one shot to take this exam unless they want to delay the onset of their college education like this 55-year-old man who has taken the galow 26 times and the scores these students receive directly influences the colleges they'll get into unlike in the us where we have a holistic admissions process meaning that admissions officers will look at the whole package instead of just test scores Chinese universities Focus just on the numbers so as expected this exam Spurs a heavy amount of stress and competition between classmates many students particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds see this exam

as the only way to change their economic and social Destiny so how well do you need to do on the gaow to get into China's top universities well it varies by province because different provinces in China have slightly different administrations of the gal C to get into schools like pecking which is often touted as the Harvard of China students in some provinces need to score in the top 1% and students in other provinces need to score in the top. 5% so it's not a surprise that students spend years prepping for this exam let's look at

a few sample questions now I'll be honest I struggled to find the English version of this exam so I'll start by showing you some questions in Chinese from the 2022 Administration here we have some of the chemistry questions for students who chose the science track here are some of the biology questions questions and here are some of the math questions now I actually found some translated math questions but they come from the 2016 exam rest assured they're still similar to what students see on the gaow today let's read a couple of them off given an

arithmetic sequence SN is the sum of the first n terms if A1 + a22 = -3 S5 = 10 then the value of A9 is what another question is in the figure below f is the right focus of the ellipse x^2 A2 + y^2 b^2 = 1 where where a is greater than b which is greater than zero a straight line Y = b/ 2 intersects the ellipse at points b c and angle BFC equal 90° then the eccentricity of the ellipse is what now some of you may also know the gala for its absurd

essay prompts here are some prompts that showed up in previous years in 2013 some students were given the following topic it flies upward and a voice asks if it is tired it says no I'm not even joking that is the entire prompt here's another one from the 2013 beijan gaat how would Thomas ala Edison react to the mobile phone if he came to the 21st century no less than 800 words choose your own title now at least this one makes more sense and it sounds kind of interesting and now I actually found a copy of

the 2023 essays and used Google Translate to decipher the prompts here's how one of them reads people have better control over time due to technological development but some people become Servants of time what associations and thoughts does this sentence triggering you now if those questions blew your mind you are not ready for what's to come because we're about to cover the All Souls Fellowship exam I'm actually so excited to talk about this exam because it is unlike anything we've talked about so far so for some context the All Souls Fellowship exam is an extremely competitive

and prestigious exam held by All Souls college at Oxford University this exam was actually once deemed the hardest exam in the world now All Souls only has graduate students and it administers this exam to search for its examination fellows these fellows get and I quote 7 years of research in ideal conditions in regular contact with leading scholars in their field and free from many of the pressures financial and otherwise which can afflict Graduate Studies in other words fellows get to pursue academic research without any worry and that too at the University of Oxford so what

does this exam look like well it's 12 hours long it consists of four papers of 3 hours each two of the papers are related to the candidates field of study for example classical studies economics English literature history law philosophy or politics and the other two papers are General papers which contain questions on a wide array of topics let's take a look at a few starzing the super rich is not art it is shooting fish in a barrel discuss which aspects of someone's life should go into their obituary why never memorize something that you can look

up is this good advice today no action or speech is ever truly spontaneous discuss and then finally how can Healthcare be funded I don't think I need to explain what makes this exam so difficult but you know what maybe these are just some outliers let's look at a couple other examples can objectifying another person ever be justified can an institution care an eternal life would be unlivable discuss how should we explain the notion of a biological species We Are All migrants Through Time discuss you know I feel simultaneously anxious and excited by these questions they

do seem kind of fun to answer but at the same time where do you even start oh and by the way years ago this exam also used to have a one-word essay examinees were given one word and had to write an entire essay in response now let me show you some of the specialist papers here's the classical studies question I am honestly speechless uh but you know what let's look at some of the philosophy questions surely they can't be that bad are you a war stretching across a region of SpaceTime never mind they are that

bad jokes aside 150 students take this exam each year of which the college will select two examination fellows that's a 1.33% okay so how does the college score these exams though well they don't or not in the sense you expect them to obviously the evaluation process for these sorts of questions is very subjective and the college says so themselves there is no single formula for gaining the fellowship the important thing is to write scripts that show you at your best bear in mind that you may need to allow yourself more latitude and ambition than usual

in the fellowship examination some risks May yield significant rewards I'm going to let you think about that one now if you want to hear about another exam that will absolutely screw with your mind well you're in luck because next up we're talking about the putam I am so excited to talk about this exam because it genuinely fascinates me I've honestly thought about making a separate video just for this exam but why is it special what makes it so exciting well first of all the puttenum is actually a competition the full name of it is the

William LEL putam mathematical competition every single year 4,000 to 5,000 of the brightest undergraduate students from the US in Canada take this exam and it has one of the craziest statistics of any exam we've talked about today the the median score is a zero a zero the top five scorers are called the puam fellows and receive a cash prize of $2500 and the school with the first place team wins a cash prize of $25,000 in recent years MIT has absolutely dominated the leaderboard I mean just take a look at the results from the 2022 competition

so now what does the exam look like it lasts 6 hours and consist of 12 questions each worth 10 points these questions cover topics like algebra combinatorics G ometry and calculus now you might be wondering gohar I've taken algebra how hard can this exam really be well these questions require a whole different level of mathematical intuition let's look at a few sample questions here's question A5 from the 83rd putam Alice and Bob play a game on a board consisting of one row of 2022 consecutive squares they take turns placing tiles that cover two adjacent squares

with Alice going first by rule a tile must not cover a square that is already covered by another tile the game ends when no tile can be placed according to this rule Alice's goal is to maximize the number of uncovered squares when the game ends Bob's goal is to minimize it what is the greatest number of uncovered squares that Alice can ensure at the end of the game no matter how Bob plays at very quick glance this question might seem a little doable but I looked at the results and out of the 546 top scorers

only six got a perfect score on this question and 444 of them received no points okay but now let's look at at an easier question it's not easy but it's easier take a couple seconds to read that cool 288 of the 546 top scorers got a perfect score on this only 82 received no points go ahead and take a look at a couple more examples I think the length of these questions makes some of them deceivingly simple but once you start working with them they'll just mess with your mind now it is kind of fun

to try and understand the solutions to these questions so just in case you're interested I'll link them in the description of this video and with that you can take a deep breath because we're done hopefully you had a fun time looking at some of the most challenging exams in the world let me know in the comments if you've actually taken one of these or plan to do so one day as always like And subscribe for more check out next admer for collegea help and I'll see you again next time