What Score Do You Need on the Luiss Test?

This is the most-asked question in every applicant forum: is 35/50 enough, is 40, is 42. Nobody gives a straight answer because Luiss does not publish admission cutoffs. That is how the system is built, not evasion. Here is what is knowable, what applicants report, and how to set a target.

How admission works

Three official facts determine everything:

1. Admission is by ranking, per degree course. Luiss ranks candidates by test score within each program. There is no published pass mark for admission. The cutoff each session is simply the score of the last admitted candidate for that course.
2. The only published threshold is admissibility: a minimum of 60/100 to be considered at all.
3. Cutoffs move from session to session, with how many people apply to your course, how strong they are, and how many places the course has.

So the honest answer to "what score do I need" is: more than the other applicants to your course, that session. The rest of this guide is about estimating what that means.

What applicants report

Official cutoffs do not exist, but applicants compare notes every cycle. From recent public threads. Treat these as anecdotes: self-reported, small samples, different sessions and applicant pools.

• For Economics and Business, applicants have suggested around 42 correct answers as a comfortable target. Careful with that number, though: 42 correct is not 84%, because the penalty bites. Answer all 50, get 42 right and 8 wrong, and you score 42 − (0.25 × 8) = 40 raw. Correct answers and final score are not the same thing on this test.
• One admitted student reported 75.5/100, described it as borderline, and advised aiming higher.
• Applicants asking about 35 correct were generally told it was risky for the popular English-taught programs.
• Popular programs (Business Administration, Economics and Business) are consistently described as more competitive than less-subscribed ones. The same score can admit you to one course and miss another.

The pattern: the competitive zone for popular programs sits well above the 60/100 floor.

You may not see an official cutoff, or your own score

Two things applicants report every cycle, worth knowing in advance:

• Rankings are published differently for different groups. Italian and EU candidates in some courses see published rankings. International applicants have reported receiving only an accept or reject email, sometimes without their score.
• Results timing varies by session and applicant group. Waiting weeks is common.

None of this changes your preparation. It does mean your scored practice mocks may be the most precise measurement of your level you ever get.

Setting your target

Given the ranking system, the penalty scheme (covered in the scoring guide), and what applicants report:

• Floor: stay comfortably clear of the 60/100 admissibility threshold, so a bad day still clears it.
• Competitive target for popular English-taught programs: aim for the low-to-mid 40s in correct answers with few wrong ones — the reported numbers above sit in that region.
• The real metric is consistency. One good mock means little. Five consecutive mocks in your target zone, under the real clock and scoring, is what ready looks like, for a test you sit once per session.

A note on the two scales. Luiss states the admissibility floor as 60/100, and the test has 50 questions scored +1, −0.25 and 0. Luiss does not publish how the raw score converts to that 100-point scale, so we don't state a conversion. Practise against correct answers and raw score, which you can compute exactly, rather than against a percentage that depends on an unpublished mapping.

Finally, remember what the score buys at Luiss: the test itself drives the ranking, with no school-record component to cushion a near miss. One caveat — Luiss does publish a bonus of +5 or +10 points for candidates who passed its Orientation Summer School test, so "score only" isn't quite the whole story for everyone. Check whether it applies to your route in the Admission Notice.