How Many Questions Are on the ARRT Radiography Exam?

The ARRT Radiography exam has 200 scored questions plus 30 unscored pilot questions — 230 questions total — and you get 230 minutes of test time. That works out to almost exactly one minute per question. Budget for a 250-minute appointment (4 hours, 10 minutes), because the seat time includes a tutorial, a non-disclosure agreement, and an exit survey on top of the exam itself.

Those are the numbers. The rest of this page is what they actually mean for how you prepare — including the single most misunderstood one, which is what "a score of 75" refers to.

The full format

The one-minute-per-question ratio isn't a coincidence — ARRT allots roughly a minute per item. That's a genuinely comfortable pace for recall questions and a tight one for multi-step calculations, which is the entire argument for having your formulas memorized cold rather than derived on the spot.

The 30 pilot questions

Thirty of the questions you answer don't count. ARRT uses them to evaluate items for future exams, they aren't identified as you go, and your answers to them have no effect on your score.

Don't try to spot them. You can't, and every minute spent wondering whether a question "counts" is a minute not spent answering it. The practical upshot is simpler than it sounds: if you hit a question that feels bizarre, unusually specific, or unlike anything you studied, there's a reasonable chance it's a pilot item — so let it go and move on instead of letting it rattle you. That's the only useful thing to do with this fact.

How the 200 scored questions are divided

This is the part worth studying, because it tells you where your hours belong:

Within those, the published subcategory splits are: Patient Interactions and Management (33); Radiation Physics and Radiobiology (21) and Radiation Protection (29); Image Acquisition and Evaluation (26) and Equipment Operation and Quality Assurance (25); and for Procedures, Head/Spine/Pelvis (18), Thorax and Abdomen (20), and Extremity (28).

Three things fall out of that table:

Procedures is a third of your exam. Positioning and projections are the single largest block — larger than Patient Care and Image Production's acquisition half combined. If you've been treating positioning as the thing you'll cram at the end, that math is against you.

Safety is bigger than most students expect, and note what's inside it: radiation physics and radiobiology sit in Safety, not in Image Production. X-ray production, photon interactions, beam quality, and dosimetry are all Safety questions. Image Production is the image-quality half — contrast, resolution, distortion, noise, equipment and QA.

Patient Care is the smallest, but it's 33 questions. That's not a rounding error you can skip; it's a sixth of the exam, and it's generally the most learnable material on it.

What "passing" means (this is the misconception)

ARRT reports your result as a scaled score from 1 to 99, and 75 is the passing score.

75 is not 75%. This trips up an enormous number of students, and it matters, because people talk themselves into panic over practice-test percentages that aren't measuring the same thing at all.

A scaled score adjusts for the difficulty of the particular exam version you sat, so the number of correct answers required to reach 75 varies from version to version. ARRT's own illustration: on some versions you might need 131 of 200 correct for a scaled 75, while on a version judged more difficult you might need only 130. The scaling is there to make a 75 mean the same level of competence no matter which version you happened to get.

Two honest consequences:

• Nobody can tell you the exact number of questions you're allowed to miss, because it depends on your version. The neighborhood of ARRT's example is roughly 65% correct, but treating any specific number as the line is a mistake — and building your study plan to just clear it is a worse one.
• Your practice-exam percentage and your scaled score aren't the same measurement. Use practice percentages to track your own trend and to find weak categories, not to predict a scaled score.

Pacing rules that actually affect your score

A few mechanics from ARRT's handbook are worth knowing before you sit down, because they change how you should play the clock:

• You must answer each question before moving to the next. There's no skipping forward and leaving a blank behind.
• You can flag a question and come back if time remains at the end.
• Always guess. Your score is based on the number of correct answers, with no penalty for a wrong one — so an unanswered question is strictly worse than a guessed one. Guess, flag it, move on.
• Your remaining time is on screen, top right. Check it at predictable intervals rather than continuously.

A simple pacing checkpoint: at one minute per question, you should be somewhere near question 115 when half your time is gone. If you're well behind that, you're over-deliberating; if you're way ahead of it, you may be rushing.

The one-paragraph version

The ARRT Radiography exam is 230 questions — 200 scored, 30 unscored pilot items you can't identify and shouldn't try to — with 230 minutes of test time inside a 250-minute appointment. The 200 scored questions break down as 66 Procedures, 51 Image Production, 50 Safety, and 33 Patient Care, so positioning is a third of your exam and physics lives under Safety rather than Image Production. Passing is a scaled score of 75 on a 1-to-99 scale, which is not 75% — the number of correct answers needed shifts with the difficulty of your exam version, and ARRT's own example puts it around 130 or 131 out of 200. Answer every question even if you have to guess, flag the ones you want to revisit, and aim to be near question 115 at the halfway mark.

Structure, timing, and scoring figures above are published by ARRT in the Primary Eligibility Pathway Handbook and its exam scoring and examination content specifications pages. ARRT is the authority on its own exam — verify current figures there before your test date.

Keep going: A 6-week ARRT study plan turns these weights into a schedule, and how to study for the ARRT covers the methods worth spending those weeks on.