Physical Therapy Assistant Exam
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Have you been considering a career as a Physical Therapy Assistant? In addition to your education, you will need to pass the National physical therapy assistant exam, sometimes known as the NPTE. In all 50 states, every practicing Physical Therapy Assistant must have passed the certification exam. This ensures consistent quality and standards across the profession, across the country.
Preparing for the Exam
Think of the exam as a standardized test, like the SATs, only you must get a certain score in order to pass. It is the baseline that you must meet in order to be considered qualified to practice in the field. There are many NPTE preparation study guides that will help you study for the best chance at passing the test. Once you have completed your training, you may want to consider picking up a book or study guide to help you prepare with sample questions and other exercises to help you practice.
The Exam There are three sections in the exam. 21.3 percent of the exam consists of questions on Test and Measures. 60 percent of the exam is covering Intervention. The remaining 18.7 percent addresses Standards of Care. There are also particular portions of the Physical Therapy Assistant Exam that cover specific systems of the body. 32 percent is devoted to non-system, 24 percent to musculoskeletal and neuromuscular each, 13 percent to pulmonary and cardiovascular, and the remaining 7 percent goes to integumentary. Exam Questions There are 200 questions on the exam. You have 4 hours to complete the test, with a fifteen minute break half way through the exam. Fifty of the questions on the exam are what are called "pre-test" questions. These questions are used to develop future iterations of the test and they do not count toward your final score. You will not know which of the questions on the Physical Therapy Assistant Exam are pre-test questions. Minimum Score The minimum score you must recieve on the physical therapy assistant exam is 600. This score is based on your number of correct answers. This means you should always try to select your best guess even if you do not know the answer. A wrong answer will not count against you. Only correct answers are tallied to produce your score, which is on a scale from 200 to 800. The reason for using a scale, rather than a percentage, is apparently to offset the difference in difficulty between various versions of the test.
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