Hello!
1) Charles University has five faculties of medicine with four faculties in Prague and one faculty in a city called Hradec Kralove (pronounced Hra-detz Kra-low-ve). Although all these faculties are part of Charles University they have their own admission policies and requirements. You should get in touch with the faculties you are interested in to find out exactly what grades etc. you need.
I applied for two faculties - the one in Hradec and one in Prague. The entrance exam and interview for Hradec Kralove was held in Imperial College in London. Luckily I got straight A's for my A levels and had good GCSE's as well, so they gave me an offer without an interview or an entrance exam.
I didn't really want to go to Hradec Kralove so I went to Prague to do the entrance exam and interview (I won't mention which faculty as I'd like to retain my anonymity online). The entrance exam is very very easy. Basic A level questions - no big mathematical or physics problems. I remember I managed to get my hands on a past paper while I was preparing and it gave me a good indication on what I needed to concentrate on. So you should try and do the same.
There was an interview as well - I think you pick two open ended questions to discuss. I remember one of my questions was about smoking and the social implications of smoking. These are opinion questions - they don't want to know about the finer details of bronchial carcinoma! So just speak about anything you like.
They added up points from the exam, interview and personal statement then posted a sheet of paper with our scores and who had gotten in at the end of the day. In my opinion it was a very very easy process.
2) Nothing is easy in Prague. You will have Czech tests every couple of weeks. The tests are quite easy sometimes and very hard other times. You'll have to study for weekly tests for many other subjects every week as well. Sometimes you'll have weeks where you have an exam every day of the week. This makes learning Czech really hard, especially when you need to concentrate on something like Anatomy which is much harder with a way bigger work load (learning all the upper and lower limb muscles including the origin, insertion, innervation, function and also memorising relevant cross sections and diagrams is a typical weeks worth of work for Anatomy in Prague). If you mess up you'll have to do the big credit tests at the end of each semester. Later in the clinical years the course gets much easier and you'll have more time to speak the language and practice if you wish. Compulsory Czech lessons end at the end of the third year.
Latin is also very hard, you'll have to learn about declensions and cases and be able to translate sentences from Latin into English and vice versa. Very hard. In some faculties you need to have passed Latin to be able to do Anatomy. My advice is to not underestimate any subject and work hard to pass your weekly exams in all subjects. Everything else will fall into place.
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4) This is a really hard question for me to answer!! I've formed a love hate relationship with Prague. As you might have gathered it's very hard in Prague, however if I could go back in time and decide again whether to stay in the UK to study medicine or go to Prague, I'd pick Prague! The lifestyle, having friends from all over the world, being able to hop on a train and go to a different country in a few hours, being able to arrange your own attachments and go to anywhere in the world for a couple of months, being able to speak another language, the operas and theatres....the list is endless.
I hope I've helped. Good luck with your A levels and keep in mind that med school in Prague will make your A level exams seem like a walk in the park. Make sure that you think you'll be able to cut it here, because I know some great students have been kicked out from here and have returned to the UK to study medicine and are “laughing” at how easy it is compared to Prague.