IMAT Practice Test - What Score Will You Get?

The IMAT (International Medical Admissions Test) is the entrance exam for English-taught Medicine and Surgery degrees at Italian public universities. For international applicants it is one of the most realistic routes into an English-taught medical degree inside the European Union, with tuition set by Italy’s income-based ISEE system rather than at international-student rates.

The IMAT differs from the UK’s UCAT in one decisive way: it tests subject knowledge. Thinking quickly is not enough. You need secondary-school biology and chemistry, in English, terminology included.

What the IMAT tests

The exam is 60 multiple-choice questions in 100 minutes, drawn from four areas:

• Reasoning and general knowledge - logical reasoning items plus questions on general knowledge and reading comprehension.
• Biology - the largest block: cell structure and function, genetics, metabolism, human physiology, and the basics of evolution and ecology.
• Chemistry - atomic structure, bonding, stoichiometry, solutions, acids and bases, and introductory organic chemistry.
• Physics and mathematics - the smallest block, built on school-level mechanics, electricity and arithmetic.

How the IMAT is scored

This is the one exam here with real negative marking:

• correct answer: +1.5 points
• wrong answer: -0.4 points
• blank: 0

With 60 questions the maximum is 90 points. The strategic consequence is serious: across five options, a blind guess has negative expected value. Guessing only becomes worthwhile once you have confidently ruled out at least two answers. Candidates who trained on exams without penalties - the ACT, for instance - routinely bleed points out of habit here.

Places are allocated from a national ranking of scores, and in previous years a minimum score threshold also applied for eligibility. Both the threshold and the admissions rules are confirmed by the annual ministerial decree.

The IMAT and Italy’s admissions reform

Italy changed admissions to its Italian-language medical degrees, replacing the entrance exam with a filter semester. The English-taught courses still recruit through the IMAT. Because the rules in this area have moved more than once recently, check the decree for your intake year before you register - it is the only source that is never out of date.

Take the IMAT sample test

The IMAT practice test below covers logical reasoning, biology and chemistry - the three areas that decide most of the points. Choose a section and a duration, and the number of questions scales to the time you pick.

How to read your result

We convert your answers onto the IMAT points scale (0-90) using the official +1.5 / -0.4 rule, but it is still an estimate, not an official score. This short sample leaves out physics and mathematics and cannot reproduce a full 100-minute sitting.

The most useful output is not the number but the distribution. If biology goes well and chemistry falls apart on stoichiometry, you have a specific topic to fix rather than a vague instruction to study more. Note too how often you answered without being sure - under negative marking, that habit costs real places in the ranking.