Which universities accept CEnT-S
CEnT-S is used across the Italian public university system for English-taught bachelor's programmes, but not in one uniform way. Some universities require it, some accept it as one option among several, some count only part of it, and at least one major technical university does not use it at all. The admission notice for your specific degree course is the only authority on which of these applies to you.
How to check for your own programme
CISIA publishes a page for every member university listing exactly which degree courses require which test. Go to cisiaonline.it, open the university you are applying to under "Atenei", and look for the courses listed under CEnT-S.
Then read the admission notice, the bando, on the university's own website. The CISIA page tells you which test is needed; the bando tells you the deadlines, the minimum score, how the score is weighted and whether the result has to be registered separately. Those details differ from one university to the next and they change from year to year.
Universities that require CEnT-S
At these universities, CEnT-S is the entry test for the English-taught programmes named in the admission notice.
Università degli Studi di Padova
Required for the English-taught bachelor's programmes, including Biology of Human and Environmental Health, run jointly with Bologna.
Sapienza Università di Roma
Required for Bioinformatics, Molecular Biology, Medicinal Chemistry and Computer Science for Pharmaceutical Applications, Applied Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, and Sustainable Building Engineering. Some of these are restricted-admission and some are open-admission, which changes what the score has to clear.
Università degli Studi di Milano
Required for the English-taught programmes listed on the course website.
Università degli Studi di Trieste
Required for Earth Sciences for Sustainable Development.
Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
Accepted for the 2026/2027 intake, with an important qualification covered below.
Universities where CEnT-S is one option among several
Università degli Studi di Firenze
CEnT-S is accepted as an alternative to TOLC-I for the engineering programmes and to TOLC-E for economics and management.
Università di Pisa
CEnT-S or TOLC-E for Management for Business and Economics.
Politecnico di Milano
The Politecnico runs its own test, the TOL, in Italian. CEnT-S is accepted as an alternative, alongside TOLC-I and the SAT. The CEnT-S result is converted onto the TOL's hundred-point scale using the Politecnico's own formula.
Two things that catch applicants out
Ca' Foscari counts only two sections
Ca' Foscari takes the mathematics and reasoning sections into consideration and disregards the rest. A candidate who performs well in biology, chemistry and physics and poorly in the first two sections may have a respectable overall raw score and still fall short there. Where a university weights sections, the overall score stops being the thing to optimise.
At Politecnico di Milano the timing is the trap
A CEnT-S result cannot be registered in the Politecnico's online services until CISIA has published the normalised scores, and CISIA does that only after the macro-period has closed. Sitting the test late in a macro-period does not help: what matters is when the period ends relative to the Politecnico's registration deadline. An applicant who takes the test in the last available window of a period can find the normalised score arrives after the deadline has passed.
Plan backwards from the registration deadline in the bando, not forwards from the test date.
Where CEnT-S is not used
Politecnico di Torino runs its own admission test, the TIL, and does not use CEnT-S. Preparing for CEnT-S will not open that door, and the two tests differ in format.
Medicine and the other health professions taught in English use the IMAT, which is a separate test set by the Ministry of Education, not by CISIA.
One score, many applications
A CEnT-S result is valid at every participating university for the period running from 1 November to 31 October, so a single sitting can support applications to several universities at once. You may sit the test once per macro-period, and there are four in the cycle.
Practise the full test before you book a sitting
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Which programmes require CEnT-S changes between admission cycles, and CISIA announces structural changes by 31 October each year. Always confirm against the CISIA page for your university and the admission notice for your degree course.