What Score Do You Need on the Luiss Test?

This is the most-asked question in every applicant forum, and it is always asked as a number. 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 Luiss publishes, and how to set a target.

How admission works

Three official facts determine everything:

1. There is no fixed minimum score. Luiss's FAQ says it outright, and names what replaces it: admission follows the ranking by score until each course's places run out. The one threshold Luiss does publish, 60/100, belongs to the anticipated test run for its Orientation 4 Summer School, a different route with its own notice.
2. The ranking is per degree course. Luiss draws up a separate ranking for each program and admits in score order up to the places offered in that selection. The cutoff each session is simply the score of the last admitted candidate for that course, and Luiss does not publish it.
3. That cutoff moves from session to session, with how many people apply to your course, how strong they are, and how many places the course has. Of those three, the places are the only one Luiss publishes, and they differ by course and by session more than most applicants expect: the next section has the figures.

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 Luiss actually publishes

Places, and nothing about scores. For the 2026/27 EU and Schengen route Luiss published how many spots each degree program offered in each session, on its own results pages. It published no applicant numbers and no cutoff score, for any course or any session.

• First session, 2026: 1,320 places across eight programs. Economics and Management 450, Law 300, Business Administration 150, Politics: Philosophy and Economics 120, Economics and Business 100, Global Law 90, Political Science 80, Management and Artificial Intelligence 30.
• Second session, 2026: 275 places, offered only on the programs that still had room. Economics and Management dropped from 450 to 90, Law from 300 to 55, Business Administration from 150 to 20.
• The 2027/28 places are not out yet. The admission notice, published in October 2026, says only that Luiss will publish them on the dedicated page of its website.

Two things follow from that list, and only those two. The size of the field you are ranked against changes completely from one program to the next: 450 places and 30 places are not the same queue. And a second session is a much smaller opening than a first, on a shorter list of programs, so it is a fallback rather than a plan.

Correct answers are not your score. Whatever target you set, set it in the right unit. Answer all 50, get 40 right and 10 wrong, and you score 40 − (0.25 × 10) = 37.5 raw: the penalty turns 80% correct into 75% of the points. Leave those 10 blank instead and 40 correct is 40 raw.

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

Two things worth knowing before results day, both from Luiss's own material:

• Results come later this cycle. For the first 2027/28 session Luiss says results will be online in the second half of April 2027. In the 2026/27 cycle they were announced on 24 March. If you are admitted, you have until 4 May 2027 to book your place with the first fee instalment, so the decision window is about two weeks.
• Whether you are shown a number is not guaranteed. Under the 2025/26 rules you could download a Test Score report with your total out of 100, forty-eight hours after sitting. The 2026/27 documents say nothing about a score report, the results pages described only how to log in, and the 2027/28 admission notice says only that Luiss will explain on its website how to see the outcome, so nobody can promise that the 2027/28 sessions will show you your score.

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 how little Luiss publishes:

• Do not set a floor: Luiss does not publish one. Set a target you can hit on a bad day, not the one you hit on your best mock.
• Do not borrow a number from a forum either. Scores posted by applicants are self-reported, from a course and a session that are not yours, and there is no published figure to check them against. Aim instead at the top of what you can actually reach: the raw score you can repeat under the clock, with the wrong answers kept few.
• 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 on a test whose navigation only moves forward, where every question is decided once.

A note on the two scales. Luiss reports results out of 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 2027/28 admission notice ranks candidates on the Luiss Test score alone, as the 2026/27 notices did, with no school-record component to cushion a near miss. Two published bonuses sit outside that, and neither reaches an ordinary regular-session candidate: +3 or +5 points for students of the Luiss Foundation Programme 2026/27, and +5 or +10 points on the anticipated Orientation 4 Summer School test, for candidates who passed the previous year's Orientation 3 test.