How IMAT Ties Are Actually Broken When Two Candidates Score the Same

Every year, a handful of candidates email us some version of the same question: "someone I know got the exact same score as me, so who ranks higher?" It sounds like an edge case, but with scores calculated in fixed increments and thousands of candidates sitting the same paper, identical totals happen more often than most people assume, and they happen most often right around the busiest part of the ranking, near a cutoff line.

Why ties happen more than you'd expect

The scoring formula produces a limited set of possible totals, not a smooth continuous scale. With a fixed number of questions worth fixed point values, a lot of different combinations of right, wrong, and blank answers land on the exact same final number. Spread that across a large applicant pool and some overlap is close to guaranteed, especially in the dense middle of the ranking where many candidates cluster within a point or two of each other.

The rule that actually resolves it

When two candidates land on the same score, the ranking doesn't leave it to chance. The older candidate, meaning the one with the earlier date of birth, is placed higher in the ranking. It's a plain, fixed rule with no appeal process or further tiebreaker needed, consistent with how most Italian national ranking exams handle ties, and it applies automatically without either candidate doing anything.

Why this isn't something to plan around

You can't move your birthday, and you can't predict in advance whether you'll end up exactly tied with someone else. Treating the tie-break rule as a factor worth strategizing around is a waste of attention, because the only thing it decides is the order between two people who already scored identically. It has zero effect on candidates above or below that tie, and it never turns a lower score into a higher one.

What actually protects you from this situation

The real lesson isn't about age, it's about margin. A tie only matters when you're sitting exactly on a line, and the safest way to never have to care who was born first is to not be that close to the line in the first place. A score with genuine room above your target university's typical cutoff range makes the entire question irrelevant, which is a far more useful thing to spend your remaining prep time on than wondering how an unlikely tie might shake out.

A tied score is rare enough that it shouldn't occupy much of your attention, and the rule behind it is simple enough that it doesn't need to. The far more useful target is building a score with enough breathing room that whether you were born in January or December never ends up deciding anything for you.