text: Difficulty This reflects the demanding nature of the examination process and the fact that students need to perform very well across a very broad range of subjects and be fully bilingual. The bilingual demands of the course work and concomitant examinations entail that monolingual students cannot pass.
  Compulsory bilingual education
  The ten compulsory courses include a mother tongue and a second language. Students are also obliged to take a third language in years 1 to 5 upon entry into secondary level education. Students must be highly skilled in two languages. They must take literature classes in both their first language and their second. Although some obligatory classes such as philosophy, biology and mathematics are taught in the students' mother tongue, other compulsory courses such as history and geography are taught in the second language ensuring students are fully bilingual. This insistence on bilingual course work and examination makes it difficult for non-bilingual new entrants to succeed.
  Evaluation
  In a 2006 study based on a sample of over 500 former European School pupils, Kelly and Kelly compared the performances at British and Irish universities of students who had participated in the EB with the performances of students who had undertaken the dominant UK equivalent qualification, A-levels.