Advice on Entry to Italian Unis for Year Out

[Juja]

DD is studying Modern Languages and plans to spend next academic year 2025/26 in Rome. She has been in touch with Sapienza University and they say to join courses in Italian she needs to take the Italian Entrance Exam. She is hoping to take modules in law.

Has anyone any experience with obtaining admission to Italian Universities? The tests seem like II+ or SAT.

Her Uni (Oxford) doesn't have bilateral agreements with Italian Unis and no assistance is provided - students have to make their own arrangements. Seems bizarre given there are 40 Italian students each year but hey ho...

I can’t help with the university part but we’ve done the visa part, for my DS. The info online is remarkably vague and unhelpful, but this continues when you get there with the whole residency permit saga. However the hardest part of the visa situation is actually managing to book an appointment. The vfs global website often doesn’t work, and appointments are rare and book months in advance. Good luck!

Students on study abroad programmes generally spend a semester or year at the host university abroad as an integral component of the undergraduate degree programme.

ECTS credits represent the student workload required to achieve the desired outcomes of modules and programmes. Each year of full-time undergraduate study at Trinity carries 60 credits and a four-year degree is 240 credits.
Generally, full-year Erasmus or exchange students are required to take a minimum of 45 ECTS and ne semester students are expected to take 25-30 ECTS.

As loads of students don’t go to a uni abroad at all on the year abroad, they cannot be required to get credits! How if they are working? So the home uni sets the same credit requirements via a dissertation or in depth study for all students whether they work or study at a uni. So they determine the credits and give the grade. The study is open to abase though.

I cannot imagine MFL students would be allowed to enrol in an English speaking course! My DD certainly was not and I think there’s a misunderstanding about what MFL departments require if anyone thinks English is ok. It’s not for MFL students. So the majority won’t be doing a course or two in English.

Unfortunately lots of home based Italian students know each other from school. Many don’t move away for uni (hence 115,000 students) and don’t need friends. Lectures are huge and impersonal. Plenty of chatting, eating and snogging. If dc want to travel, it’s less likely Italian friends will do this. Or a family. It depends what you want from the year abroad but DD really valued travel and being independent. The uni wasn’t great and somewhat chaotic. But that’s Italy!

Dd tried. Got declined a visa. I think I still have ptsd from the visa appointments down in London. I lost about £1200 as had paid the university and never got the money back when she couldn’t go. She had at least 2 f2f appts , loads of forms and evidence. Got declined the first time as her travel insurance didn’t last the whole trip and I think she also needed evidence of a plane ticket. So those were purchased and she went back and then they just said nah. They said she could learn Italian in England! 🤷‍♀️

i think if your Dd can already speak some Italian she will have a better chance but she will need to show evidence of competence at a certain level.

And I completely agree with the pp about the problems getting appointments, the forms not being clear, the vsf website being a nightmare and everyone being extremely unhelpful. Take cash for photocopying to your appt!

@FeegleFrenzy That is just awful! No normal student has more than 2 years at uni behind them. Obviously others are fluent and still do an undergrad in MFLs here. However for those who are ab initio (and that’s a lot) they won’t be fully proficient but that’s a reason for going. Did the uni not advise? Did she not do the year abroad?

As an aside, what a stupid country we are.

Florence university were no help. Saying that I suspect she didn’t push for a refund as hard as she could have done (no skin off her nose as it was my money). But i definitely emailed them asking for advice about the visa and they just said I had to do the process. She wanted a gap year learning Italian.

We paid for a proper university course of over 20 hours a week as we know they’re cracking down on the dodgy language college type courses. She ticked every box and met everything that they said she needed to meet. She had proof of over 30k cash in her bank account to demonstrate she could fund herself. It was a real heartache. She was literally meant to be flying out on the Monday and her visa was rejected on the weds after she was meant to leave.

i can remember asking for advice on an Italian fb group and was astounded by the level of hostility from the Italians on that group. Said they did not need foreign students coming to Italy, etc. the message from them was very much that the govt was cracking down on visa approval and they were all happy about that.

shes now trying for a Canadian visa just as the Canadian govt announce a crack down on allowing foreign students there!

Ah. So no uk uni as sponsor? That should make a difference. Not quite sure why standard Italians would be against students going there unless it’s a housing issue. However the right is on the rise.

Why go to Canada? What’s wrong with here? Is she now a student here?

Correct. No uk university involvement. She’s done her undergraduate degree here and finished. Wanted a year tossing it off in Italy after spending the summer in Florence after graduating.

she wants to go back to uni to do a masters and is currently waiting to hear back from a number of UK universities. But she’s also applied to Ottawa as she has a Canadian boyfriend. I’m praying Cambridge or UCL accept her as that would be enough to swing her staying here.

"We paid for a proper university course of over 20 hours a week as we know they’re cracking down on the dodgy language college type courses."

If you go through a reputable language school, they will help with the visa process.

For Italian universities you do need to take the TOLC entrance exams. Some of it is verbal reasoning, but a lot is knowledge based, mainly on the subjects your taking the TOLC for. DD did TOLC for STEM subjects, she had lots of questions on the three sciences plus maths. Please bear in mind Italian maths is more in depth, it has a lot more geometry and you need to do the working out the Italian way. That said for a language based TOLC you might not have maths or it will be easier, BUT bear in mind that all students here study maths until they leave school, so if your DD dropped it at GCSE it might be worth brushing it up.
In the TOLC you also have questions on Italian and European history and also constitution. There are online sample questions, if you google the relevant TOLC you should find past tests or sample tests.

Finally, you do get points taken off for incorrect answers, so just guessing is risky, hence it being worthwhile looking up questions and practising. Also, please check the correct TOLC required by the university, some select different ones. Eg. Bologna uses TOLC I, which is the engineering one, to access biology and biochemistry, whereas everyone else uses TOLC B.

Most Italian universities do not, understandably, want international students to enrol for a first year only as a year abroad or gap year. One of our DC was able to do this but made it abundantly clear in their application that this was their intention; it was not a mainstream, publicly funded course in any event and our DC has the possibility of returning to Italy to complete years 2 and 3 of the course after their degree at a UK university. This makes sense given the subject area.

I didn’t think exchange students were enrolling for year 1 of a course. A bit more pick and mix. So no entrance requirements. It seems to have become unnecessarily complex. Exchange took the place of a student, and for MFL, a MFL student studying English. Essentially they swapped places at uni. That was the whole point. So that’s why DD had some requirement to do modules in Italian and some free choice in others. She could not do year 1 law.

Also if you are doing a MFL swap, why does maths matter? Two years studying the MFL surely matters more?

@TizerorFizz Because it’s in the TOLC test, whatever the subject it seems to test overall knowledge/ability. Otherwise why would there be questions on the constitution/literature/history in the medical entry test? Because there absolutely were.

Although I’m also puzzled as to why an exchange student would need to do a TOLC test, that’s to access the course as a full time student.

@Melassa I guess the reason for tests is taking a place on a degree course and maybe the difficulties of not being in Erasmus? Plus Oxford doesn’t have links with unis for exchange purposes which I find odd. This would smooth the way I would have thought.

MFL year abroad students have had their options severely curtailed by Brexit: they can no longer access Erasmus (either the places on exchange programmes nor the funding) and they now require visas to study in EU countries (where most MFL years abroad take place). It seems as if Oxford has not yet caught up with the new reality.

It might be worth checking uni websites to see which Italian unis other places are linked to.

DD's uni is linked to Padua, Manchester to Pisa, Bergamo and Bologna - if you could get a list together it would give you a start.

DD has to find a place for French but is Irish passport qualified so won't need a visa.

I'm hugely grateful for the continuing information particularly @Melassa re the TOLC - we had clocked about losing 0.5 marks for every wrong answer but not about needing to know about Italian / European history / Maths. For Law / Humanities at Sapienza it is TOLC-SU.

@Ceramiq I completely agree Oxford hasn't adapted to support its students post Brexit. And DD admittedly is wanting to do something a bit unusual. Currently DD is going to progress this plan but also come up with a Plan B. Her other 'requirement' 😊 is a city / town with a good rowing club - Rome has quite a few.

@HPFA good idea to see where there are links - I think the trouble is as @TizerorFizz said post Brexit the system works on the principle of Exchanging students and Oxford is I can only conclude rather meanly not willing to offer exchange places back in Oxford except for a very few. So Italian unis understandably might well say why acceptance an Oxford Student when they will not take ours in return.

@Ceramiq it is a good question but as @TizerorFizz said above my DD would effectively be occupying a place on a competitive course - even if she just applies for a few single module options ie not register for Year 1 of a 5 year Law Degree. Sapienza only seems to have a limited range of courses that don't require TOLC. But definitely she needs to explore back ups.

Anyway all this is helping DD's Italian as she works through reams of bureaucracy and regulations. Must look on the bright side...

@HPFA I listed the links still maintained at DDs old uni but these are “owned” by the MFL dept. Other departments might include other unis. I haven’t looked but you search under a department.

I think it’s unlikely unis would give up hard won exchange links and allow other unis to make no effort and swoop in. As I recall, DD had to make a competitive application to her own uni department to study in Bologna. Places were limited and it was popular. There are many unis that have exchange students via long standing arrangements and Turing but I’m not convinced that these links are relevant here because the uk and Italian staff have worked hard to maintain them so why not let your own students have the benefit of this? Cannot see how piggybacking could work (if that’s what you meant?) for a student from another uni.

Florence definitely has rowing clubs and I rather think Turin would too. Turin is a fantastic city.

@Juja As someone who DC has managed to spend an entire year in Italy, as a gap year, and completed all requirements and passed into second year, I admit that I am somewhat perplexed by your DD's ambitions to enrol immersively in an Italian university without any supporting formal exchange agreement. I don't think Italian universities are set up for this; think about it in reverse - UK universities aren't set up for this and don't allow it. Italy has several università per stranieri, of which Perugia is the best known, which by design teach Italian language and culture to foreign students. US universities have all sorts of year abroad arrangements in Italy that mostly involve small satellite campuses, sometimes open to students from other (mainly US) universities. Italy, quite rightly, doesn't want random foreign students in its universities.

If your DD wants to live immersively in Italian (which she should!), maybe she needs to think more about her living arrangements and renting a room in a flatshare with Italian students? I'm not at all sure in any event that progress in Italian would be ensured by auditing lectures designed for Italian students as there will be absolutely no one to one correction of any work to meet native speaker expectations.

Bocconi might work but fees are very high:
https://www.unibocconi.it/en/international-students

@Ceramiq thanks for all the helpful suggestions and yes I agree with you that when you look in reverse why would an Italian Uni accept a random one year student from the UK! This is why we are bemused there aren't more bilateral arrangements between Italian Unis and Oxford.

I will suggest DD looks at your options though I know she is seeking to minimise her contact with other international students by taking courses undertaken by Italians. Living with Italian students is a great idea though we had heard many Italian students live at home - hence her idea of living with a family.

I take heart that your DC successfully worked through the system....

The good news is the International Students Office at Sapienza has been quite helpful and welcoming - if vague on specific details- they seem used to having students coming for one year from overseas. Their suggestion is applying to a series of single modules - but do make it clear that for many of these applicants still have to take TOLC. And if you took modules from different subjects that might mean different TOLCs! Another mystery...

What DD definitely needs is a series of Plan B options....

Not all Italians live at home. Although my DC lived with other foreign students in Florence, some course mates chose to flatshare with Italians. If your DD is going to be in Italy for a whole academic year this should be feasible and there must be Italian students out there who would embrace a bilingual English-Italian household with the aim of supporting language acquisition for both parties.

I've obviously only got your info to go on but I'm not impressed by Oxford's Italian department. They really ought to have better services to help third year undergraduates navigate their years abroad in the post-Brexit post-Erasmus world. Are other Oxford language departments as hopeless?