I thought I would throw my five cents here, too. I was born and raised in Poland, where I progressed through the entirety of the public education system all the way through high school. Since I left Poland to pursue pre-medical studies and now medicine in the US, the schooling system has undergone major changes but I will nevertheless do my best to provide you with as accurate and current a picture as possible.
As is the case for Germany and many other European countries, the Polish education system forces students to have a good idea of their future careers very early on. Upon graduating from primary school (8th grade), you sit national exams that determine where you will be accepted to high school. Each high school has a pre-professional track, the most common of which are pre-medical (where biology, chemistry, and physics are on an extended level), pre-law/humanities (where history, legal studies, and Polish are on an extended level), and pre-engineering (with maths and physics on an extended level). While a pre-medical profile does not theoretically mean that one should necesarilly pursue medicine, all of my high school classmates ended up studying either medicine or dentistry. Unfortunately, there is still a great deal of contempt among Poles towards nursing, pharmacy, or nutrition, all of which I have heard to be labelled as "failure careers" or "plan B options" if you don't get into med school.
In high school, at least as part of the pre-medical concentration, you complete the coursework that college students are normally required to take, with the exception that it is not split into specific courses. For instance, you would have a longitudinal Biology course across all 4 years, and each semester would pertain to a different field, i.e. biochemistry, genetics, physiology, anatomy, evolution. The same idea applies to all other subjects. Despite the fact that students realize biology, chemistry, and physics on an advanced level (which takes up to 20 hours a week), we were mandated to take a whole slew of humanities, foreign languages, and social sciences at the same time. Taking this into account, students spend around 40-45 hours a week in classrooms, which I personally found dreadful (no time for extracurriculars), even if it did prepare me well for the undergrad here.
Upon graduating from high school, you sit final national examination called Matura. Students are given an opportunity to select the subjects they want to take based on the studies they want to pursue. For medicine, applicants are usually required to present a high score in biology, chemistry, physics, and/or maths. You usually take your final exams in May and you are notified of your result sometime in June, while July is when the admission cycle to medical schools starts. Your scores from the aforementioned exams are the SOLE determinant of whether you get in or not; there are no interviews, personal statements, or letters of reference. The admission cycle is therefore extremely quick - you usually know within a week or so whether you get in or not, since all the adcoms have to do is to create a ranked Excel spreadsheet of all their applicants. The spreadsheet is then posted on their websites to inform everyone of the admission cycle outcomes. There are only about 17-18 medical schools, so there is not a lot to choose from. However, given the fact that previous admission cycle results are openly available online, it is very easy to gauge what score you need to get into a specific school, so students usually end up applying to only 1-2 schools.
If you perform poorly on the final exam, you are forced to take a year off, as tests are only offered once a year. However, if your scores are JUST below the threshold, you may be offered (or petition the school) a spot in the entering class for an annual fee. Whereas medical school is free in Poland, such students will be asked to pay somewhere around 20,000 PLN (~$5,000) per semester to remain enrolled.
This covers the basics. 😃
