If the degree you are after is taught in English and belongs to the humanities, history, law or politics, you may meet an acronym that is neither the TOLC nor the CEnT-S: English TEST HUMANITIES, or English TEST HUM. It is a test run by the CISIA consortium, entirely in English and designed for the humanities and social area. Unlike the Engineering or Economics tests, the stakes here are usually lower: more often it is a language check than a competition. In this guide I put in order what I have read on the official sources and what remains not verified.
Date of reading for everything below: 29 October 2026.
Structure: 30 questions, three sections, 90 minutes
From the CISIA «Structure and syllabus» page (@HOME or @UNI format):
| Section | Questions | Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Reading and comprehension | 10 | 30 |
| Clues and inductive reasoning | 10 | 30 |
| Reasoning on texts and data | 10 | 30 |
| Total | 30 | 90 |
Each question has one correct answer. The score is +1 for a correct answer, 0 for a wrong one and 0 for a blank one: maximum 30. This is the most important difference from the TOLCs and the CEnT-S, which deduct 0.25 points per wrong answer. Here there is no penalty, so leaving a question blank never pays: a random pick has a positive expected value. Each of the three sections has its own timer (30 minutes), and calculators are not allowed.
What is inside each section
Reading and comprehension. Comprehension of English texts at B2 level: non-fiction, literary passages (from 1890 onward) and journalistic articles from the last ten years. CISIA speaks of abstraction skills, formal and semantic relations, and what is implicit in the text.
Clues and inductive reasoning. You start from specific observations and reach general conclusions: implications, presuppositions, attention to minor details. Texts are contemporary international fiction, academic essays (from 1950) and journalism.
Reasoning on texts and data. Argumentation and logic (negation, conjunction, disjunction, quantifiers such as every, all, none, at least), necessary and sufficient conditions, reading numbers, tables and graphs (histograms, pie charts, line charts) and elementary calculation: percentage, ratio, proportionality, arithmetic mean.
Level: CISIA requires no specific preparation for the text sections. I have read no public official paper, so I cannot guarantee a difficulty level: my reading, as a teacher, is that the question type resembles the TOLC-SU and the TOLC-SPS but in English. It is an estimate, not a figure from a call.
Who requires it: what I have verified
The CISIA page for the list of universities, when I re-read it, said: «Page under construction. The list of universities will be available soon». So there is no single official list. The degrees I found on official sources:
| University / degree | What the source says | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Sapienza, Rome: bachelor’s degrees Global Humanities and Classics | @HOME test, eleven dates from February to October 2026 (17 Feb; 10 and 27 Mar; 10 and 17 Apr; 5 and 12 Jun; 7 Jul; 7 Aug; 8 Sep; 8 Oct), fee 45 €; verification test, OFA of Academic English below 12/30; exemptions with English TOLC-E, SAT or certificates (IELTS 5.5 and similar); pre-selection from 22 December 2025 to 31 July 2026 (15 May for non-EU applicants with a visa) | Sapienza call read |
| University of Messina: Transnational and European Legal Studies (Law) and Political Sciences and International Relations (SCIPOG) | From 2026 they use the English Test HUM (all three sections assessed), threshold 8/30 to avoid OFAs; until 2025 they used the English TOLC-E, threshold 6/23 | Departments’ thresholds document read |
| University of Milan (Statale) | An orientation page links the test to the degree Ancient Civilizations for the Contemporary World | Not verified: I have not read the call |
The two contexts differ: at Sapienza the test shows who must make up academic English after enrolling; at Messina it sets a threshold to avoid an OFA. In neither case I read is it a merit ranking. If your university uses it differently, that university’s call prevails over this guide.
The open question is whether a university you care about requires it: I do not know for any university beyond those in the table. Always check the list of degrees in the call.
Dates, @HOME and @UNI
For Sapienza the 2026 dates were eleven, between 17 February and 8 October. The 2027 dates are not published: when they come out we will report them in the tests calendar. The two modes are @HOME (from home, with remote proctoring) and @UNI (at a venue). Which one is accepted is decided by the university.
How to prepare
The test requires no syllabus, it requires habits: reading in English, reasoning on texts, reading numbers.
Reading (B2). Twenty minutes of daily reading from non-fiction and from a British or American newspaper, with one working rule: after each article, write in one line what the author states and in another what the author takes for granted. That is exactly what the test measures with implicit content. An original example: if a text says «the city reopened its libraries after the works», you cannot conclude that they were in bad condition before: we only know they were closed for works.
Clues and inductive reasoning. Small details matter here. A useful exercise: read a short story, cover the ending and write three hypotheses about how it ends, each backed by a precise sentence of the text. It trains the section directly, because it forces you to look for clues instead of following an impression.
Reasoning on texts and data. It is the most trainable section, because the question types are few. Two original examples:
Logic. «All participants handed in the form. No one who handed in the form was excluded.» It follows that no participant was excluded: a valid chain. Change the second sentence to «Some who handed in the form were excluded» and the conclusion flips: since all participants handed in the form, now at least one participant was excluded.
Data. «A university has 2,400 students; 15 % attend the history course and 40 % of these live away from home.» History students are and those away from home are : 6 % of the total. With no calculator, split into steps you can do in your head.
For basic logic there is the article on logical reasoning, and for your starting English the English page.
Strategy in the test
- Answer everything. With +1/0/0 a random answer has a positive expected value and a blank is always worth zero.
- One section, one timer. Thirty minutes for ten questions: three minutes each. If in reading you spend five on one, you have two for each of the others.
- Read the questions first in the text sections: knowing what you are looking for changes how you read.
- In data reasoning, estimate before computing. If three options out of five are incompatible with an order of magnitude, you have already removed half the work.
Typical mistakes
- Studying as if there were the −0.25 and leaving questions blank out of caution.
- Preparing the test like an English literature exam: comprehension and reasoning are needed here, not history of literature.
- Taking for granted that the university requires it: check the call for your degree.
- Not rehearsing the @HOME format: room, computer and connection are part of the test.
What I do not know yet
As of 29 October 2026 the following is not published or not verified: the official list of universities on the CISIA site; the 2027 dates; the Milano Statale call; the number of attempts allowed per cycle; any official sample paper.
If you want to understand how much preparation you need and how to split your time between reading and reasoning, the free introductory call is for that: in half an hour we see where you start. The tests I prepare are listed on the admission tests page, and for the humanities area there is the humanities page.
