Tips for Taking the National Physical Therapy Exam

Nothing is more important at this stage of your career than preparing for the National Physical Therapy Exam. After all, you've been a physical therapy student for 3 long years, and you're ready to move on to the next step of your life. It's just a little exam-how bad could it be?

Format of the Exam

The NPTE is a 5 hour exam that attempts to test every facet of your clinical reasoning skills. It has 250 multiple choice questions that will tax every ounce of critical thinking you have. The passing score is 600/800, or 75%, but there is some variability to this score. The Federation for State Boards of Physical Therapy (who administers the test) will adjust the passing score slightly to account for exams that are generally harder or easier than normal.

The questions for the exam are constantly changing to reflect current best practice in physical therapy. Of the 250 questions, 50 will not be scored and are "pilot questions" that will be judged on their difficulty and may be included as scored items on future exams. There is no way of distinguishing between the 200 scored items and the 50 "test" questions. This means that you could miss 50 questions and still receive a perfect score! Don't count on it, though.

Preparing for the Exam

If you're reading this during the last semester of your third year of PT school, you're probably going to wish that you had started studying a little sooner. If you're in your second year, you're probably going to ace the thing because you've started studying early. Really, the most important part of your preparation is starting early. The test gives you 5 hours to test your knowledge of 3 years' worth of classwork. In fact, I realized when I was preparing for it that there were some things that we had only had very brief exposure to, such as patient safety details and ethical dilemmas. While we had some experience and knowledge to draw from, we hadn't really been exposed to a test that integrated things like that into the anatomy and physiology of physical therapy. Thus, gaining exposure to these sorts of questions and exam formats is critical.

Now, if you search the internet for the best PT exam study guides, you'll come up with about 6-10 solid programs that do their best to train you for the test in a variety of ways. The hard part is trying to figure out which one is the best fit for you. Some use just a textbook with sample questions and review guides, while others integrate a weekend review course into the study material. It's a big decision trying to figure out whom to go with, but if you don't want to have to buy all of them on your slim student budget, go to this review guide to compare all of the systems.

If you learn nothing else from reading this, just remember- Study Early and Often!