There is no official ranking of the hardest courses in the Philippines. CHED does not publish one, the PRC does not publish one, and the lists that circulate are usually built from board exam passing rates — which is the worst available measure, because rates move every cycle, differ wildly between schools sitting the same exam, and reflect who was permitted to take the exam as much as how hard the subject is.
So this guide ranks by things you can actually check in a published document:
- Prescribed workload — the minimum units in the program's CHED memorandum order
- Mandated hours outside the classroom — practicum, clinical and immersion requirements
- Years before you can legally practise — including post-graduate stages
- Whether the program is licensure-gated, and how CHED itself judges programs that fail at it
Each of those is verifiable. None of them requires guessing.
Measure 1: prescribed units
A 2025 Philippine Institute for Development Studies review of the ten most-subscribed undergraduate programs found minimum unit requirements spanning a wide range:
| Program | Minimum units | Governing CMO |
|---|---|---|
| BS Nursing | 192 — highest of the ten | CMO No. 15, s. 2017 |
| BS Business Administration | 122 — lowest of the ten | CMO No. 17, s. 2017 |
Nursing prescribing 57 percent more units than business administration is not a rhetorical difference. It is roughly an extra year of coursework built into the standard itself.
Two cautions. First, these are minimums — the same study observes that "the norm is for institutions to exceed minimum credit requirements, presumably as a signal of quality," so the school's actual prospectus is the number that matters. Second, unit counts across other programs are set by each program's own CMO and vary; the Bachelor of Engineering Technology standard issued in 2025, for instance, sets a minimum of 146 units.
Measure 2: the hours that units hide
Units are a poor proxy for effort because PSGs count internship in units, not hours. The gap between the two is where a lot of unexpected difficulty lives:
| Program | Mandated hours | Units it appears as |
|---|---|---|
| BS Criminology | 540 internship hours | Counted in units, per PSG |
| Bachelor of Engineering Technology | 720 hours industry immersion (one semester) | 6 units |
| Associate in Radiologic Technology | Four and a half months clinical education | 16 units |
| Associate in Computer Technology | Minimum 320 internship hours | Counted in units |
The PIDS review makes the general point: Philippine curricula are "GE-heavy, internship-light" relative to Australian, EU and ASEAN benchmarks, and internship reckoning is inconsistent because "a three-unit internship course in Economics would be fulfilled by 200 hours, whereas a similar credit load in Engineering might require a 450-hour practicum."
Before you compare two programs, ask each school for the practicum hours in writing. A six-unit line on a prospectus can mean a full semester of unpaid full-time work.
Measure 3: years before you can practise
This is the measure that separates the genuinely long courses from the merely heavy ones.
Medicine. CMO No. 18, series of 2016 describes the Doctor of Medicine as "at least a four (4)-year post baccalaureate program." It starts after a bachelor degree, not instead of one. Then: "Satisfactory completion of the 12-month internship is a requirement for taking the Physician Licensure Examination." And the degree does not entitle you to the title — the CMO states graduates "may use the title 'M.D.' after their names, only after they have been issued the license to practice medicine" by the PRC. The MD sits at PQF Level 7.
Law. Legal education is regulated by the Legal Education Board rather than CHED — CHED's own service catalogue excludes "those under the Legal Education Board (LEB)" from its permit and recognition process — and the bar examination is administered by the Supreme Court, not the PRC. Like medicine, it is entered after a bachelor degree.
Everything else is bachelor plus a board exam. Which is a real gate, but a shorter one.
If you are budgeting review time for a licensure exam, our guide on how long to review for a board exam covers what people actually plan for.
Measure 4: the licence, and how CHED polices it
Forty-six professions are regulated by the PRC, each with its own Professional Regulatory Board and licensure examination. A program feeding one of those boards is structurally harder than one that does not, for reasons that have nothing to do with the subject matter:
- Mandated resources. PSGs for licensed programs prescribe laboratories, equipment and affiliation arrangements. The ART standard, for example, lists specific items down to leaded blockers and anthropomorphic phantoms.
- Mandated clinical or field hours, as above.
- A pass-or-repeat gate at the end, with a wait until the next sitting if you miss it.
And crucially, CHED treats poor board performance as a program failure, not a student failure. The ART PSG provides that an HEI whose graduates average below 25 percent in the licensure examination over three consecutive years is put on a sanctions ladder — warning, then probation, then a stop on admissions with gradual phase-out. Monitoring visits that find non-compliant areas trigger the same escalation.
That figure is a gift to prospective students. Ask any school in a licensed field for its three-year average. It is the same number CHED uses.
Our full list of courses with board exams maps all 46 boards to their feeder degrees.
So which courses are hardest?
Ranked by the measures above, with the measure named rather than implied:
| Rank | Course | Why, specifically |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Doctor of Medicine | Post-baccalaureate, at least four years, plus a required 12-month internship before the licensure exam |
| 2 | Law (JD) | Post-baccalaureate, separate regulator (LEB), bar administered by the Supreme Court |
| 3 | BS Nursing | Highest minimum unit requirement of the ten most-subscribed programs at 192 units, plus clinical requirements and a licensure gate |
| 4 | Engineering programs | Heavy prescribed units, laboratory requirements, mandated immersion, and a licensure gate in most disciplines |
| 5 | BS Accountancy | Licensure-gated, with a multi-subject examination format that drives long review periods |
| 6 | BS Criminology | 540 mandated internship hours in the PSG, plus a licensure gate |
What this ranking deliberately does not do is claim that one course is "harder" than another for you personally. A student who reads well and dislikes numbers will find a heavy-memorisation licensed course easier than a lighter quantitative one. If maths is your specific obstacle, our list of courses without math is the more relevant read.
The school changes the difficulty as much as the course
CHED prescribes minimum outcomes and minimum units. It explicitly allows schools to reach them differently — HEIs "are allowed to design curricula suited to their own contexts and missions provided that they can demonstrate that the same leads to the attainment of the required minimum set of outcomes, albeit by a different route."
In practice that means the same degree at two schools can differ in:
- total units, because most schools exceed the minimum
- sequencing, which decides whether your heaviest semester lands in second or third year
- retention and grade requirements, which are largely institutional
- laboratory and clinical placement quality, which affects how much you learn per required hour
Compare prospectuses, not brochures. How college programs are organised explains what to look for and what each document means.
If you are about to choose a hard course
- Get the total units from the prospectus, not the CMO minimum and not the brochure.
- Ask for practicum and clinical hours in hours, not units.
- Ask what happens if you fail a professional subject — repeat rules, deloading, and whether it delays the whole block.
- In licensed fields, ask for the three-year board average, and ask how many graduates actually sat the exam.
- Check whether the timeline includes stages after graduation — internship, post-bacc study, review period.
- Be honest about hours available. If you will work while studying, a 192-unit program with a full clinical load is a different proposition than the same program full-time.
Difficulty is not a reason to avoid a course. Choosing one without knowing its actual shape is.
Sources
- Philippine Institute for Development Studies, "Review of CHED Policies, Standards, and Guidelines (PSGs) Pre- and Post-K to 12 Reforms," Discussion Paper Series No. 2025-13 — https://pidswebs.pids.gov.ph/CDN/document/pidsdps2513.pdf
- Commission on Higher Education, CMO No. 18, series of 2016, Doctor of Medicine PSG — https://legacy.ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/CMO-18-s.-2016.pdf
- Commission on Higher Education, CMO No. 4, series of 2025, Associate in Radiologic Technology PSG — https://legacy.ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/CMO-NO.-4-S.-2025.pdf
- Commission on Higher Education, CMO No. 20, series of 2025, Bachelor of Engineering Technology PSG — https://legacy.ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/CMO-NO.-20-S.-2025.pdf
- Commission on Higher Education, CMO No. 13, series of 2021, Associate in Computer Technology PSG — https://legacy.ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/CMO-No.-13-S.-2021.pdf
- Commission on Higher Education, Citizen's Charter — https://caraga.ched.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Updated-CHED-Citizens-Charter.pdf
- Professional Regulation Commission, Professional Regulatory Boards — https://www.prc.gov.ph/professional-regulatory-boards
