Belarus CE

Overview

The Centralized Exam (Централізаваны экзамен / Централизованный экзамен, CE) is Belarus's standardised school-leaving and university-entrance assessment for secondary-school graduates. Since 2023 it has combined what used to be two separate steps — the school graduation exam and the Centralized Testing (CT) entrance test for the same subjects — into a single sitting, so a grade-11 graduate no longer sits both. The Republican Institute for Knowledge Control (RIKC), which operates under Belarus's Ministry of Education, sets and scores the CE.

Who can apply

CE is compulsory for every student finishing grade 11 of general secondary school in Belarus, whether or not they intend to go on to university. A student may only sit CE in a subject if their year-end school mark in that subject is a passing one; a student who does not meet this receives a certificate of attendance rather than the full leaving certificate. Current grade-11 students are not required to apply individually — their school registers them and arranges for them to sit the exam.

Someone who already holds an earlier secondary-leaving certificate — a graduate from a previous year, a vocational/technical-college graduate, or an international applicant — does not sit CE. They apply instead for the related Centralized Testing (CT), which RIKC also runs, for whichever subjects their intended university programme requires.

Exam pattern

Every grade-11 graduate sits two compulsory CE papers:

If a university programme requires a third subject beyond these two, the applicant sits that subject separately through CT rather than CE. RIKC scores CE and CT on the same scale, so a subject counts the same toward admission whichever of the two exams it was taken through.

Each subject paper is a standardised test written against the official school syllabus for that subject. It mixes closed-type items, where the student selects the correct answer or answers from options given, with open-type items that ask the student to supply the answer themselves, so the paper checks both recall of facts and terminology and more complex problem-solving.

Marking and results

RIKC marks each CE paper on a 100-point scale. For the school-leaving certificate, that 100-point score is converted into the ordinary 10-point certificate mark using a subject-specific conversion table the Ministry of Education publishes for each exam year.

For university admission, a programme's selection score combines the applicant's CE scores (plus any CT score taken for a third subject) on the 100-point scale with the average mark on their school-leaving certificate, so both the exam results and the certificate count toward the ranking used to admit students.

Important dates

For 2026: CE in the state-language subjects (Belarusian and Russian) was held on 29 May; CE in the profile subjects was held on 26 May, with reserve sittings on 2 June (mathematics, biology, geography, foreign language) or 5 June (History of Belarus, social studies, chemistry, physics) for students unable to sit on the main day. RIKC began sending profile-subject CE results by SMS from 6 June 2026, and certificates became available at the testing centres from 1 July 2026.

How to apply

Current grade-11 students do not register individually for CE; their school enrols them and brings them to the assigned testing centre, which may be at the student's own school or at a nearby one designated for the exam. A student who separately needs a CT subject for admission registers with RIKC directly, either through the online form or in person at a registration point, and must show proof of identity (passport, identity card, residence permit, or refugee certificate; or the police report issued when the original document is lost or stolen).

Preparation tips

• Decide the profile subject early, matched to the entrance requirements of the actual degree programmes being targeted, since the subject chosen for CE applies for that exam year.

• Check whether the intended programme needs a third subject beyond the two taken at CE, and register separately for it through CT within its own registration window.

• Practise with RIKC's own released test collections for the chosen subjects, since both the question format and the score-conversion tables are set subject by subject.