How to prepare for the TOLC-SU: Humanities degrees

If you want to jump straight to how I follow you in lessons, see the TOLC-SU preparation page — here instead you will find the complete guide.

It is the end of September 2026: the autumn session of the TOLC-SU is open, with remaining places until November. If you register now you sit the test in four to eight weeks — that is the window the plan in this post is calibrated on. If this session isn’t for you, the next one is the winter-spring one (February-May), and the universities’ calls for 2027/28 come out between October 2026 and January 2027.

First thing to know: the TOLC-SU is not a general-knowledge test. It is a reading test. 60% of the questions — 30 out of 50 — sit in a single section, text comprehension and knowledge of the Italian language. Those who prepare by revising dates, authors and facts are studying the wrong section, the one worth a fifth of the test. This post teaches you to read a test passage, not to know more.

How the test is built

The TOLC-SU, run by CISIA (the consortium that organises the TOLC tests for Italian universities), is taken TOLC@CASA (online, with supervision) or in person, depending on the university. You book from the reserved area of cisiaonline.it, and it costs €35 per session, non-refundable. Three subject sections plus English:

• Text comprehension and knowledge of the Italian language — 30 questions, 60 minutes (2 minutes per question)
• Knowledge acquired in your studies — 10 questions, 20 minutes (2 minutes per question)
• Logical reasoning — 10 questions, 20 minutes (2 minutes per question)
• English — 30 questions, 15 minutes, common to all TOLC tests, no penalty

Subject total: 50 questions in 100 minutes. Scoring: +1 correct, 0 skipped, −0.25 wrong. The time per question is the same in all three sections — two minutes — so here the main problem is not time, it is precision: you have room to read calmly, and those who go wrong do so through imprecise reading, not through haste. How much the score counts in the ranking and whether the best or the last attempt counts is decided by the call of the individual course, not by a rule that is the same for everyone: check it before planning how many times to retake the test. You can retake it no more than once per calendar month for this type of test.

A useful note for those aiming at Sport Science (Scienze motorie): some universities (for example Turin and Bergamo) also use the TOLC-SU as the entrance test for that course, but it is not a general rule — Sport Science has locally limited admission, and each university chooses independently which TOLC to require. Always check the call of the specific university.

The section that decides everything: text comprehension

Thirty questions out of fifty are here. It is not “one section among three”, it is the test. The procedure I teach:

1. Read the question first, then the passage. You already know what to look for, and you read with a goal instead of reading and then going back.
2. Identify the author’s thesis before the details. Many questions ask “what is the position of the text on X”, not an isolated detail: if you have the thesis in your head, you answer in a few seconds.
3. The correct answer is the one written in the text, not the one that is true in the world. It is the most important rule of the whole section. A typical distractor is a plausible, perhaps agreeable, statement that the passage nevertheless does not say. If you can’t point to the line or passage that supports it, it is not the answer.
4. Recognise distractors built on a word taken from the passage but out of context. The text uses a term in one sense, the wrong answer reuses it in a slightly different sense, and fast readers fall for it because “the word was there”.

The recurring types: meaning of a term in context (not the dictionary one: the one it takes on in that passage), the author’s thesis, inference (what can be deduced, without adding anything of your own), function of a paragraph (“why does the author introduce this example”).

Knowledge of the Italian language

Within the same 30-question section you also find more pointed questions on the language, not only on comprehension of passages. The points where most is lost:

• Logical-textual connectives. “However”, “therefore”, “nevertheless”, “moreover”: recognising which one correctly links two sentences is often quicker to do by elimination (three connectives change the sense of the sentence, one doesn’t) than by grammar rule learned by heart.
• Text cohesion. Reordering or completing a passage so that the argument stays coherent: it is a matter of following the logical thread, not of guessing a style.
• Synonyms and register. Telling an exact synonym from one that slightly changes the register (formal/informal) or the shade of meaning.
• A few grammar knots. Agreement, use of verb moods, relative pronouns: you don’t need a systematic revision of Italian grammar, you need to review the three or four mistakes that really recur in the questions (for example the all-purpose “che” vs the correct relative pronoun).

Knowledge acquired in your studies: don’t revise everything

This is where the costliest mistake in terms of study time hides. There are 10 questions out of 50: history, geography, literature, civic education, at general high school level — not specialist. Revising “all of history” or “all of literature” to gain 10 points out of 50, when comprehension is worth 30, is a bad allocation of time. A summary diagram of the great historical turning points of Years 4 and 5, the main literary movements with one emblematic author each, the basic concepts of civic education (the Constitution, the structure of the State) is enough. One day, not two weeks.

Logical reasoning

The same types that come up in all TOLC tests, here on 10 questions in 20 minutes:

• Deductions from premises. What follows necessarily from one or more given statements, and what instead seems plausible but isn’t.
• Necessary and sufficient conditions. “If A then B” is not the same as “if B then A”: it is the most frequent distractor in this type of question, and those who recognise it answer in twenty seconds.
• Negation of a statement. The negation of “all the enrolled students handed in the form” is “at least one enrolled student didn’t hand it in”, not “no enrolled student handed it in”. It is a systematic mistake, not a random one: once the rule is understood, you don’t go wrong again.

Those who come from a high school with strong training in critical reading often find this section simpler than expected: it is akin to the way you analyse an argumentative text, not to calculation. The six types of logic question that come back in the TOLC tests, with a worked example for each, are in Logical reasoning in the TOLC.

The English section

Thirty questions in fifteen minutes, with no penalty for mistakes, and typically they do not enter into the score of the three subject sections: they are used by the university to assess whether to assign you a language training requirement. The practical consequence: always answer all 30, even by intuition. Leaving them blank brings no advantage.

The penalty and when to skip

TOLC questions have 5 options. If you can eliminate $k$ options as definitely wrong, the expected value of answering at random among the remaining $5-k$ is:

Without eliminating anything ($k=0$) the expected value is zero, exactly like skipping. But it is enough to eliminate one single option for it to become positive (about +0.06), and it grows quickly from there: with two options eliminated it is already +0.17, with three +0.38. The practical rule for text comprehension: if you can discard even just the answer most blatantly not supported by the passage, it is worth answering. If all the options seem equally plausible — it often happens with texts read in a hurry — skip.

Three worked exercises

(The test itself is in Italian; the examples below are translated, and the connectives of exercise 2 are given with their English equivalents.)

1. Text comprehension. Read the passage and answer.

“In recent decades the reading of fiction has declined in many age groups, while the time devoted to short, fragmented content has grown. Some scholars link this shift to an impoverishment of the capacity for prolonged concentration; others object that fragmented reading in any case develops skills of selecting and summarising information, different but not necessarily inferior to those required by the linear reading of a novel.”

Question: According to the passage, the position of the scholars cited second is that fragmented reading: (A) is the main cause of the decline in the reading of fiction — (B) develops different skills, not necessarily worse, compared with linear reading — (C) should be discouraged in favour of fiction — (D) demonstrates a general impoverishment of cognitive abilities — (E) has no effect on reading skills

Let’s take apart the wrong options one by one. (A) is the thesis of the first group of scholars, not the second: the passage sets them against each other (“others object”), so (A) swaps the two groups. (C) is not written anywhere: the passage describes two positions, it does not prescribe a behaviour. (D) is again the thesis of the first group, here wrongly attributed to the second. (E) is too strong: the text says that the skills developed are “different”, not that they are absent — “no effect” is not supported. That leaves (B), which picks up exactly the words of the passage (“different but not necessarily inferior”).

2. Italian language — connective. Complete the sentence with the correct connective: “The transport strike had been announced weeks earlier; ___, many commuters were stuck for hours.” (A) in fact — (B) however — (C) nevertheless — (D) therefore — (E) that is

The connective links “the strike had been announced weeks earlier” (premise) to “the commuters were stuck all the same” (an outcome contrary to the expectation created by the premise). “In fact” (A) introduces a confirmation, not a contrast: discarded. “Therefore” (D) introduces a linear consequence, but here the consequence contradicts the expectation: discarded. “That is” (E) is a rewording, irrelevant. That leaves (B) and (C), both adversative, but “nevertheless” has a more marked register and is less natural in a news-report sentence: you pick the option whose register fits the rest of the passage, so (B) however.

3. Logical reasoning — negation of a statement. What is the correct negation of “All students enrolled in the course passed the admission exam”? (A) No enrolled student passed the admission exam — (B) All enrolled students did not pass the admission exam — (C) At least one enrolled student did not pass the admission exam — (D) Most enrolled students did not pass the admission exam — (E) None of these

The negation of a universal statement (“all X are Y”) is not the opposite universal statement (“no X is Y”, which is a much stronger claim and not necessary to negate the first), but the existence of a single counterexample. One enrolled student who did not pass the exam is enough for “all passed” to become false — it is not necessary that nobody passed it. (A) and (B) say the same strong and wrong thing in two different ways; (D) introduces a quantity (“most”) that is neither the starting proposition nor its logical negation. Answer (C).

To train on questions like these with real timing, use the free TOLC-SU mock exam: the correct answer is free, the guided solution unlocks with your first lesson.

An eight-week plan

Week 1 — diagnosis. One complete timed mock exam. Note your errors by type: “confused author’s thesis with personal opinion”, “wrong adversative connective”, “negation of universal statement” — not generically “text comprehension”.

Weeks 2-4 — text comprehension, the bulk of the work. One timed passage a day (2 minutes per question, so a 5-question passage in about 10 minutes), corrected line by line: for each wrong answer, find the exact sentence of the passage that should have guided you. Don’t count how many you get right: understand why you got wrong the ones you got wrong.

Week 5 — Italian language. Connectives, cohesion, synonyms and register, the three or four grammar knots that recur. Batches of 15-20 questions a day.

Week 6 — logical reasoning + knowledge acquired. Four days on deductions, necessary/sufficient conditions, negations (20 questions a day); the summary diagrams of history, literature and civic education in one or two study sessions, no more.

Week 7 — full mock exams. Two or three, timed by section, reviewed question by question with the same method as weeks 2-4: not the score, the why of each error.

Week 8 — light revision only. A last mock exam mid-week, then stop. Reread the logic diagrams (negations, necessary/sufficient conditions) and the trickiest connectives. The night before the test counts more than an extra day of study.

How we work in lessons

I always start from a diagnosis: we use the first hour for a mini-test reasoned through together, to understand whether it is the reading method, the theory of the language, or anxiety under the clock that is costing you points. From there we build a plan that alternates guided reading of passages, exercises on language and logic, and mock exams reviewed together, online with a graphics tablet and shared screen.

If your second test is the TOLC-PSI (an audience often close to those who also look at Humanities degrees), the comparison of structure and strategy is in How to prepare for the TOLC-PSI. If instead the course you are interested in is Political Science, the twin guide is How to prepare for the TOLC-SPS. To understand how the raw score becomes a ranking, here is how it is calculated.

For the full picture of the tests I prepare for, the Admission tests page; for the humanities in general, humanities subjects.

If you want to understand where to start, I offer you a free introductory call: you tell me where you are and I tell you honestly how many weeks you need and on what.

The TOLC-SU doesn’t ask you to know more: it asks you to read better, under time pressure. Those who prepare for it by training reading instead of memory pass it with room to spare. Measure yourself right away with the free mock exam.