IMAT 2027 Retake: Plan Your Second Attempt From Your 2026 Score

This plan is built on the 2026 rules (DM 1005/2026); check it against the 2027 decree when that is available. In 2026 the paper had 60 questions with five options and one correct answer, in 100 minutes, split across five sections. Each section is worth its number of questions times 1.5 points.

Biology and chemistry are 38 of the 60 questions and 57 of the 90 points. The syllabus for every section is in Allegato A of the decree; it is the list to plan from, not a prep company’s topic list.

Your total hides two different losses. A wrong answer costs 1.9 points compared with a right one: the 1.5 you did not get plus the 0.4 taken off. A blank costs 1.5. So the same total can come from very different papers, and they need different fixes: wrong answers often come from guessing or misreading, blanks from running out of time or gaps in the syllabus, and going back over each wrong or blank question helps you tell which.

Here is a worked example: a student with 30 right, 16 wrong and 14 blank (our example, not a real candidate).

This student scored 38.6. Biology lost the most points, 17.4, more than chemistry (13.6) or physics and mathematics (11.7). The plan for this student starts with biology, the section that both lost the most and carries the most points.

Pick a target score. The gap is the target minus your total. Each wrong answer you turn into a right one gains 1.9 points; each blank you turn into a right one gains 1.5. So the fewest extra right answers you need come from fixing wrong answers, and the most come from filling blanks.

For a target, use the score of the last candidate given a place at your university in a past year, and treat it only as a reference: it is not this year’s cut-off. Each figure comes from one published list in one year, and non-EU candidates residing abroad are ranked separately at each university. Three 2025/26 examples, re-read on the published lists on 20 October 2026:

Against Sapienza’s 65.80, the student in the worked example is 27.2 points short. That takes at least 15 more right answers if they replace wrong answers (15 × 1.9 = 28.5), and at most 18 if they replace the 14 blanks first (14 × 1.5 = 21.0) and then 4 wrong answers (7.6), 28.6 in all. The free gap report at the top of this page does this arithmetic on your own numbers.

Two numbers decide how much time a section deserves: how many points it carries, and how many it lost you. A simple, honest split gives each section half its weight in the paper and half its share of your lost points. For the worked example that puts biology first, chemistry second and physics and maths third; logic and reading together get the least time, because they are only 9 questions.

A full mock tells you most when it is sat under test conditions: one sitting of 100 minutes, no calculator, no notes, and no looking anything up halfway. Leave a question blank when you cannot rule out any option, exactly as you would on the day, because the blanks and wrong answers are what you will count afterwards.

Then mark it the way CINECA does: +1.5, −0.4 and 0, section by section. Write down, for every question you missed, which of three things went wrong: you did not know the fact, you knew it but misread or slipped, or you ran out of time. The first is a syllabus gap for your plan, the second is a checking habit, the third is pacing. Keep these in one error log for the whole year, and before the next mock redo every logged question without looking at the answer. Comparing section points from one mock to the next tells you more than the total does, because the total mixes a section that improved with one that slipped.

With five options, +1.5 for a right answer and −0.4 for a wrong one, a completely blind guess is worth slightly less than nothing on average. Rule out one option and a guess is worth making. The table is our arithmetic on the official marks.

The break-even is a 21.05% chance of being right (0.4 divided by 1.9): above it, answering is worth more than a blank on average. Your 2026 hit rate in each section, right answers divided by questions answered, shows how reliable your answers were there; where it was low, review why the wrong ones went wrong before you change how often you answer. Try your own numbers in the IMAT score calculator.

Official IMAT papers from past years are worth sitting under timed conditions, and we do not sell them. Use only a copy published by the ministry or a university, and before you compare a score with a mock, check its number of questions per section against 4, 5, 23, 15 and 13. Our mocks are our own questions in the 2026 format, not CINECA questions, so they add to past papers rather than replace them.