How CEnT-S scoring works
CEnT-S is marked in two stages, and most candidates only hear about the first. The raw score is what you earn on the day. The normalised score is what the university receives, and it is not calculated until the macro-period has closed.
The raw score
A correct answer earns 1 point. A blank earns nothing. A wrong answer costs 0.25.
With 55 questions, the raw score runs from −13.75, if every question is answered wrongly, to 55. A candidate who leaves everything blank scores exactly 0, which is worth remembering: a negative score is possible, and it means answering badly rather than not answering at all.
| Section | Questions | Maximum |
|---|---|---|
| Mathematics | 15 | 15 |
| Reasoning on texts and data | 15 | 15 |
| Biology | 10 | 10 |
| Chemistry | 10 | 10 |
| Physics | 5 | 5 |
| Total | 55 | 55 |
When guessing pays
The penalty is set so that a blind guess is worth nothing. With five options, one guess in five is right and earns a mark, while the other four each cost a quarter. One mark gained against four quarter-marks lost comes to zero.
That is the whole design: random answering neither helps nor hurts. What changes the arithmetic is elimination.
| Options remaining | Expected value per guess |
|---|---|
| 5 (no idea) | 0 |
| 4 | +0.06 |
| 3 | +0.17 |
| 2 | +0.38 |
| 1 (certain) | +1.00 |
The moment you can rule out a single option, guessing becomes profitable. Down to two options it is worth nearly four tenths of a mark, which over several questions is a meaningful difference.
The practical rule is not "when in doubt, leave it blank". It is: eliminate what you can, and answer whenever you have eliminated anything at all.
The arithmetic, in three minutes
The same calculation worked through step by step, if you would rather watch than read.
Normalisation, and why nobody can predict your final score
CISIA does not report the raw score to universities. It adds a normalisation coefficient to each section, and the rules define how:
coefficient = number of questions in the section − sum of the ease of each question
A question's ease is the average score it earned across everyone who was asked it, so it ranges from −0.25, if almost everyone got it wrong, to 1, if almost everyone got it right. A hard section produces a low ease sum and therefore a large coefficient, which is added to every candidate in it.
Three consequences follow.
- —The coefficient is the same for everyone who sat the same section, so it does not change the ranking.
- —It cannot be calculated until the macro-period closes, because it depends on how every candidate performed. No preparation site can tell you your normalised score in advance, and any that claims to is guessing.
- —A normalised score can exceed 55, since the coefficient is added on top. A candidate who scores 40 raw in a hard section may be reported well above that.
The timing has a practical cost that catches applicants out. Because normalised scores appear only after a macro-period ends, sitting the test in the last window of a period can leave the score arriving after a university's own registration deadline. Politecnico di Milano is the clearest case of this.
How each university uses the score, and the deadlines to plan around →
What this means for practice
Practising without the penalty teaches the wrong instincts. Answer everything on a test with no penalty and your score only goes up; do the same on CEnT-S and it goes down. The habit worth building is elimination: which options can be ruled out, and how quickly.
Practise with penalty marking
One-way sections and the real section timers.
Start practice →