EDAIC Part 2 Pass Rate and Pass Mark, Explained

Q: Is Part 2 graded on a curve against other candidates?

No. The edaic oral exam pass rate emerges from how many candidates meet the standard, not from a forced ranking. If everyone in your session demonstrates competence, everyone can pass. You are measured against the criterion, not against your neighbours.

How the structured oral exam is marked

The defining feature of the SOE is that it is structured. Examiners are not free to wander wherever curiosity takes them. Each candidate moves through a set series of stations, and within each station the questions are guided so that the same clinical territory is covered for everyone. This is what makes the exam fair and what makes a meaningful pass mark possible.

Stations and domains

The viva is divided into stations that, between them, sample across the breadth of the specialty — basic sciences applied to clinical scenarios, general and sub-specialty anaesthesia, and intensive care, emergency and pain medicine. You are scored at each station by examiners, typically in pairs, so that no single examiner's impression decides your fate at that table.

The thinking behind this is straightforward: anaesthesia is broad, and a safe consultant cannot be excellent in one corner and dangerous in another. By marking station by station, the exam checks that your competence holds up across domains, not just on your favourite topic.

What examiners are listening for

It helps to understand what is actually being graded. The SOE is far less about reciting a fact and far more about demonstrating safe, structured clinical reasoning. Examiners are listening for:

A clear, prioritised approach — can you say what you would do first, and why?
Safe judgement under pressure, including when you would call for help or escalate.
The ability to justify a plan and adapt it when the scenario changes.
Honest handling of uncertainty rather than confident bluffing.

A candidate who says "I am not certain of the exact figure, but my priority here is to secure the airway and treat the hypotension, and here is my reasoning" almost always scores better than one who guesses a number and ignores the dying patient in the stem.

How a pass is determined: the edaic part 2 pass mark

Here is the part most candidates get wrong in their heads. There is no secret single line — "get 72% and you are through" — that applies forever. The EDAIC uses criterion-referenced standard setting (an Angoff-style approach), which means the standard reflects a defined level of competence rather than a fixed quota or a norm-referenced curve.

Criterion-referenced, not graded on a curve

In a norm-referenced exam, you are competing against the other candidates: the top slice passes and the bottom slice fails regardless of how good or bad the cohort is. The EDAIC deliberately does not work this way.

In a criterion-referenced exam, you are measured against a standard. If every candidate in the room meets the standard, every candidate can pass. If none do, none pass. Your performance is judged against what a competent anaesthesiologist should be able to do — not against how your neighbour performed.

This is exactly the same philosophy that governs the written papers, and it is why the pass rate and pass mark explainer for the diploma as a whole is worth reading alongside this one. The principle is consistent across both stages.

What this means for the edaic part 2 pass mark in practice

Because the standard is criterion-referenced, the practical pass mark is best understood as: did you demonstrate the expected level of safe, competent reasoning across the stations? Performance at the stations is combined according to ESAIC's published marking rules to reach an overall outcome. The implications for you are concrete:

You cannot coast on one strong station. Consistency across domains matters because the exam is sampling your breadth.
You are not fighting the other candidates. A strong cohort does not raise the bar against you; a weak one does not lower it.
A serious safety lapse carries weight. Demonstrating an unsafe plan at a station is costly in a way that a forgotten dose often is not.

The exact mechanics — how station scores aggregate and what threshold defines a pass for a given cycle — are set and published by ESAIC. Always confirm the current rules on the official EDAIC pages rather than relying on forum folklore.

How to read the edaic part 2 pass rate

Now to the number everyone wants. Whenever you see an edaic part 2 pass percentage quoted, treat it with care, because a raw figure tells you less than it appears to.

Why the headline figure can mislead

A reported edaic part 2 pass rate is shaped by who is in the room, not by a fixed difficulty dial. Several things distort the simple percentage:

The candidate pool is pre-filtered. Everyone sitting Part 2 has already passed Part 1, so this is an already-selected, already-capable group. The denominator is not "all trainees."
First attempts and resits are often blended. A cohort heavy with resitting candidates can read differently from one dominated by first-timers.
Preparation varies enormously by background. Candidates from training systems with strong viva cultures may perform differently from those who have rarely been examined aloud — through no difference in underlying ability.

So a published edaic oral exam pass rate is a useful piece of context, but it is not a prediction of your odds. Your odds are set by your preparation against the standard, not by last year's cohort.

A quick comparison of the two stages

Feature	Part 1 (written)	Part 2 (oral / SOE)
Format	MTF written papers (A and B)	Structured oral viva with guided questions
What is tested	Recall and applied knowledge	Clinical reasoning, judgement, safety
Language	Several European languages offered	Generally conducted in English
Standard setting	Criterion-referenced (Angoff-style)	Criterion-referenced (Angoff-style)
Marking	Statement-level, no negative marking	Station-level, examiner pairs
Best read alongside	How to pass Part 1	Is the EDAIC difficult?

For the genuinely current pass-rate and pass-mark figures for either stage, go to the official ESAIC/EDAIC (myESAIC) website. ESAIC publishes the authoritative numbers, and they are the only ones I would trust enough to plan around.

Where the dates and figures actually live

A note on timing, because candidates conflate the two parts constantly. For the 2026 cycle, the Part 1 written exam is confirmed for 19 September 2026. The registration window for that 2026 Part 1 sitting has already closed, so do not treat any registration deadline as still open.

For Part 2 dates, centres and deadlines — and for the next cycle's Part 1 details — the only reliable source is the official EDAIC pages via myESAIC. I deliberately do not quote fees, exact question counts, specific centres or precise pass percentages here, because those move and you deserve current figures, not a stale snapshot. Our overview of EDAIC 2026 dates, fees and registration is kept aligned with the official source, and there is a dedicated rundown of Part 2 2026 dates and centres too.

How to actually prepare for the viva

Understanding the marking is half the battle; rehearsing for it is the other half. The SOE rewards a very specific skill — thinking out loud, safely and structurally, under mild pressure — and that skill is trainable.

Build reasoning, not just recall

Because the exam grades reasoning, your revision should produce frameworks you can deploy aloud, not just facts you can recognise. A few that reliably come up:

Local anaesthetic systemic toxicity (LAST): stop injecting, call for help, manage airway and seizures, and give intravenous lipid emulsion as per current resuscitation guidance — know the sequence cold and follow your local published protocol in real practice.
The unanticipated difficult airway: have a staged plan (optimise, escalate, declare, and progress towards front-of-neck access if you cannot oxygenate), framed around current difficult-airway guidelines.
Context-sensitive half-time: be ready to explain why a drug like remifentanil offers rapid offset even after prolonged infusion, and contrast it with agents that accumulate.

These are revision pointers — in clinical practice always work to the current local and published guidelines. The point for the viva is that you can narrate a safe, ordered plan rather than freeze.

Practise out loud and use spaced retrieval

Two habits move the needle most. First, rehearse answers aloud, ideally with a colleague firing scenarios at you, so that structured speaking becomes automatic. Second, keep your underlying knowledge warm with spaced retrieval; our piece on the spaced repetition memory method explains why this beats cramming, and a realistic study plan for the EDAIC helps you fit it around clinical work. The same intensive-care material that anchors Paper B reappears in the viva, so revision rarely goes to waste.

A high-quality EDAIC question bank is more useful here than it first looks: working through stems forces you to articulate reasoning, surfaces the gaps in your frameworks, and trains the recall speed a live viva demands.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a fixed EDAIC Part 2 pass mark?

Not a fixed numerical line that holds across all cycles. The exam is criterion-referenced (Angoff-style), so the standard reflects a defined level of competence rather than a quota. Performance across the stations is combined per ESAIC's published rules. Check the current rules on the official EDAIC pages.

What is the EDAIC Part 2 pass rate?

It varies by cycle and depends on the cohort, who has already passed Part 1, and the mix of first-timers and resitters. I deliberately do not quote a specific figure here. For the current edaic part 2 pass percentage, consult the official ESAIC/EDAIC (myESAIC) website, which publishes the authoritative numbers.

Is Part 2 graded on a curve against other candidates?

No. The edaic oral exam pass rate emerges from how many candidates meet the standard, not from a forced ranking. If everyone in your session demonstrates competence, everyone can pass. You are measured against the criterion, not against your neighbours.

What language is the oral exam in?

Part 2 is generally conducted in English, even though the Part 1 written exam is offered in several European languages. Make sure your spoken clinical English is exam-ready, not just conversational.

Does passing OLA affect Part 2?

The On-Line Assessment (OLA) relates to the Part 1 written stage — passing it under ESAIC's conditions can exempt a candidate from sitting Part 1. It does not replace the Part 2 viva. See our OLA explainer for the detail.

You cannot control the headline pass rate, but you can control how ready you are against the standard — and that is the only variable that decides your result. The fastest way to build viva-grade reasoning is deliberate, spaced practice on real questions. Create a free AnesCORE account to get started, and put the EDAIC question bank to work building the structured, out-loud thinking the SOE rewards. For the current official figures and dates, always confirm on the ESAIC/EDAIC website.