Physics catch-up practice test for Year 3 of the liceo scientifico.

Are you in Year 3 and need to make up physics? This is the third-year catch-up exam: 20 questions drawn at random from a bank of 50, on the Year 3 programme, so every attempt is a different test. Scoring works like the TOLC admission tests (+1 correct, −0.25 wrong, 0 blank), and at the end you receive by email the correct answer to every question with your weak points by topic — with an account you see them straight away on this page (the step-by-step solution unlocks with your first lesson).

The catch-up exam is the test an Italian high-school student sits in late August or September to make up a subject failed during the school year; the liceo scientifico is the science-oriented high school.

Test in ItalianThe questions of this simulator are in Italian, as in the real exam.

Test prepared by Gaetano Livornese · Aerospace engineer, Politecnico di Milano · maths and physics tutor · updated 13 October 2026

What the Year 3 catch-up exam really asks

The physics catch-up exam for Year 3 does not fish at random across the whole programme: it is always the same four or five patterns, at textbook difficulty. These are the ones that come back almost every time.

• ✓Projectile motion, with range, maximum height or time of flight
• ✓A problem on conservation of mechanical energy, with or without friction, or a one-dimensional collision
• ✓A satellite in orbit: Kepler’s third law or orbital speed
• ✓The first law of thermodynamics applied to a process, or the efficiency of a heat engine

The mistakes that cost you the grade

You do not fail the September exam because of the hard topics: you fail it because of three or four mechanical mistakes that repeat in every exercise. On this programme they are these.

• ✗Putting an acceleration in the horizontal direction too in projectile motion: along x the motion is uniform, the only acceleration is g downwards
• ✗In gravitation, confusing the orbital radius with the height above the surface: the formula uses the distance from the centre of the Earth
• ✗Swapping the signs of Q and W in the first law: heat absorbed is positive, work done by the gas is positive
• ✗Using degrees Celsius instead of kelvin in the gas laws and in efficiencies
• ✗Using conservation of mechanical energy where there is friction: there energy is not conserved, and the work of the friction force has to be written down

What order to revise in

Start with motion in the plane, because that is where the Year 3 exam almost always draws from and because it is Year 2 kinematics seen from another angle: if that holds up, it is recovered quickly. Then energy and momentum, the shortcuts that solve everything else, and gravitation. Fluid dynamics and thermodynamics last and on their own: they are chapters in themselves, with a language of their own, and mixing them into the mechanics revision only confuses.