Finnish valintakoe

Overview

"Valintakoe" (entrance exam, or selection test) refers to the field- or programme-specific admission tests that complement Finland's national Matriculation Examination (Ylioppilastutkinto) when someone applies for a place in a Bachelor's-level degree programme at a Finnish university. It is not one single national exam the way the Matriculation Examination is; it is a family of exams, consolidated since the 2025/2026 admissions reform into a smaller set of shared, lettered tests (for example Valintakoe A, B, C or G), each covering a cluster of related degree programmes across several universities at once, in place of what used to be dozens of separate programme-specific tests.

Finnish university admission increasingly runs on certificate-based selection (todistusvalinta) instead: for the 2026 admissions cycle, 60% of all starting places at Finnish universities (70% at the Hanken School of Economics) are filled purely from Matriculation Examination grades, with no entrance exam required. Valintakoe remains the main, or only, route into fields that are more competitive or professionally regulated, such as medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, law and psychology, and it still fills a meaningful share of seats in several technical and business fields even where certificate-based selection runs alongside it.

This page covers only the university-level entrance exams. The separate school-leaving exam most candidates sit before applying, the Matriculation Examination, is covered on its own page: Ylioppilastutkinto.

Who can apply

• Anyone with general eligibility for Finnish higher education: most commonly a completed Matriculation Examination (Ylioppilastutkinto), an International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma, a European Baccalaureate, a Reifeprüfung or Deutsches Internationales Abitur diploma taken in Finland, a Finnish vocational upper secondary qualification, or an equivalent foreign qualification recognised for Finnish higher education.

• Applicants apply to specific degree programmes through the national joint application; it is each programme's own admission criteria that decide whether certificate-based selection, an entrance exam, or both are on offer, and which lettered exam, if any, applies.

• Certificate-based selection places are generally reserved for first-time applicants, meaning people who have not already accepted a degree-programme place in Finnish higher education. Applicants who do not meet that condition, or whose chosen programme has no certificate-based route, apply through the entrance-exam route instead.

• Field-specific restrictions apply in some cases. In medicine and dentistry, for example, an applicant must choose one field or the other within a given application round; the same exam sitting cannot count toward both at once.

Exam pattern

The shape of a valintakoe depends on the field. Since the 2025/2026 reform, most lettered exams combine a common section, shared across every programme that uses that letter, with a field-specific differentiated section for the particular programme the candidate is applying to. Confirmed details for a sample of the lettered exams in the 2026 cycle:

Valintakoe G, for example, is a three-hour, digital, supervised exam worth 100 points in total: 70 points from a common section that tests general knowledge-acquisition and conceptual-understanding skills, and 30 points from a section specific to the chosen field (law), based on pre-study material published a few days before the exam date. For 2026 it was sat at university exam centres in Helsinki, Joensuu, Jyväskylä, Kuopio, Lappeenranta, Mariehamn, Oulu, Rovaniemi, Tampere, Turku and Vaasa.

Other lettered exams (for example D, E, F, H and I) cover further field clusters, including psychology, business and economics, education, humanities, social sciences, and languages and literature, each with its own common and differentiated sections. The current list of exams, the fields each one serves, and its exact date and format are published each year on yliopistovalinnat.fi, the site the Finnish universities share for this purpose.

Marking and results

Each degree programme splits its intake between certificate-based selection and valintakoe, and the split varies by field. In technology and engineering programmes, roughly 20% of seats are filled through entrance-exam results, with most of the rest filled by certificate-based selection; in business and economics, roughly 50% of seats go through the entrance exam. Fields such as medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine and law weight the entrance exam far more heavily, and in some of them it is effectively the main route in.

Certificate-based selection converts the Matriculation Examination's own grades into points using one of a small set of standardised scoring tables introduced for the 2026 admissions cycle. Most fields score five subjects; medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, biomedicine and nutrition science score six.

Each lettered entrance exam has its own points scale and marking criteria, set by the university network responsible for it; Valintakoe G, for example, is marked out of 100 points. Score thresholds (the lowest score among admitted applicants) are not published in advance; they come out with the results and differ by programme and by year, because they depend on that year's applicant pool. As one illustration only, the University of Helsinki's law programme reported a preliminary 2026 entrance-exam threshold of 64 out of 100 points for that round, a figure specific to that year and that one programme rather than a general benchmark.

Important dates

For 2026:

• Spring joint application, first round (programmes taught in a language other than Finnish or Swedish, the Arts University's programmes, and Tampere University's theatre arts programme): 7 to 21 January 2026.

• Spring joint application, second round (the main round, for Finnish- and Swedish-taught university and university-of-applied-sciences programmes): 10 to 24 March 2026, closing at 15:00.

• Entrance exams: held mostly over a run of dates in late May and early June. For 2026, Valintakoe B on 25 May, Valintakoe A on 1 June, Valintakoe F on 3 June, Valintakoe C and Valintakoe G on 4 June, and Valintakoe I on 5 June.

• Certificate-based selection results: published by 25 May 2026.

• All results, including entrance-exam-based selection: published by 2 July 2026.

• Deadline to accept an offered place: 9 July 2026, by 15:00.

How to apply

All Bachelor's-level admission to Finnish universities, including every valintakoe, runs through Finland's single national joint application (yhteishaku), submitted on the Opintopolku (Studyinfo) portal. One application lets a candidate list up to six degree-programme choices, in order of preference, across different universities and fields.

There is no separate registration for a lettered entrance exam: choosing, on the joint-application form, a degree programme that uses Valintakoe A, B, C, G or another letter registers the applicant for that exam automatically. Exam venue, timing and, where one is used, pre-study material are then published through Opintopolku and the responsible university network ahead of the exam date.

Applicants relying on a foreign qualification, or applying to a programme taught in a language other than Finnish or Swedish, generally use the earlier January joint-application round rather than the March one, and may need to submit extra eligibility documents through Opintopolku alongside the application.

After the exam

A programme's acceptance list is finalised once both selection methods have results in: certificate-based results come first, by 25 May 2026, and the full set of results, including every valintakoe, follows by 2 July 2026. An applicant offered a place in more than one programme can usually hold only one higher-education place per term, so accepting one offer through Opintopolku can close off the others.

An offered place must be confirmed through Opintopolku by the national deadline; for 2026 this was 9 July 2026 at 15:00. A place not confirmed by then is released back into the pool. Score thresholds, once published, apply only to that year's applicant pool and are not a guarantee for future rounds.

Preparation tips

• Work out early whether your target programme fills its seats mainly through certificate-based selection, through valintakoe, or through a mix of both. The entrance-exam share varies a lot by field, from roughly a fifth of seats in some technology and engineering programmes to about half in business and economics, and to effectively all of them in fields such as medicine or law.

• If your programme's exam publishes pre-study material in advance, as Valintakoe G does for law, treat that material as the actual syllabus for the differentiated section, not as general background reading on the subject.

• Where several programmes or universities share the same lettered exam, past versions of that exam are realistic practice material, since the format and the common section are shared nationally.

• If you are choosing between closely related fields with separate application rules, such as medicine and dentistry, decide which one to apply for before the joint-application deadline, since you generally cannot apply to both in the same round.

• Track both 2026 joint-application windows if you might apply to a foreign-language-taught programme (January) as well as a Finnish- or Swedish-taught one (March), since they open and close separately.

FAQs