PoliMi TOL Practice Test - What Score Will You Get?

The TOL (Test OnLine) is the entrance exam for engineering degrees at Politecnico di Milano - Italy’s highest-ranked technical university and one of the most popular destinations for students looking for an English-taught engineering degree in continental Europe.

The TOL is not a general aptitude test. It examines specific content: secondary-school mathematics and logic, physics, and English. Candidates who plan to get through on quick thinking alone usually come apart in the mathematics section.

What the TOL contains

The exam covers four areas:

• Logica, Matematica e Statistica - the heaviest part: algebraic manipulation, inequalities, functions, trigonometry, statistics, coordinate-plane graphs, and word-logic items involving ordering, deduction and reading data tables.
• Fisica - the basics of mechanics, electricity and thermodynamics: short calculations, conceptual questions and circuit diagrams.
• Comprensione verbale - a passage with questions to be answered strictly from what the text says.
• Inglese - sentence-completion items testing grammar and vocabulary.

At PoliMi the English section has a double role: it counts towards your result and it also determines whether you are assigned an English OFA (obbligo formativo aggiuntivo) - an additional obligation to clear once you are enrolled. A comparable mechanism exists for mathematics. That is good news for candidates with solid English: points that would be cosmetic elsewhere save you real work in your first year here.

How admission works

Admission at PoliMi runs on a ranking of results against the places allocated to each test session. The TOL is offered in several sessions per year, and earlier ones generally carry more places. The calendar, the thresholds and the detailed rules are published by the university in its admissions notice for the academic year - and it is that notice, not any guide, that you should plan against.

There is one more thing to check before you settle on a programme: the language of instruction. Master’s degrees at PoliMi are overwhelmingly taught in English, but at bachelor’s level a substantial share of the engineering catalogue is still taught in Italian, with English available on selected tracks. This shifts between intakes, so the programme catalogue for your year is the only reliable source. Design and architecture recruit separately, with their own tests and their own deadlines.

Take the TOL sample test

The TOL practice test below covers the Logic & Mathematics section and the English section - the two areas where international candidates most often lose, and most often gain, points. Choose a section and a duration, and the number of questions scales to your time.

How to read your result

We report the result on a normalised 0-100 scale, because the real TOL counts points by its own rules and against its own OFA thresholds. So this is an estimate, not a prediction of your rank. It also leaves out physics and verbal comprehension.

The signal to watch is straightforward. If logic and mathematics come out well but English does not, you are probably heading for an English OFA - and that is one of the easiest things to fix before the exam. If it is the other way round, start with algebraic manipulation and functions: they pull scores down most often, and they return the most points per hour of work.