PassProfessor’s ARRT CT program is part of the expanding PassProfessor catalog. The program is being built for ARRT’s postprimary Computed Tomography examination — organized on the four content categories in ARRT’s current content specifications — and enrollment is not open yet. Join the notify list and we will email you when enrollment opens — then use this guide to plan your path through the pathway and the categories.
This program is part of the expanding PassProfessor catalog — join the notify list and we’ll email you when enrollment opens.
This guide explains the Computed Tomography examination from the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists (ARRT). CT is a postprimary credential: candidates arrive holding a supporting ARRT credential, with structured education and documented clinical experience behind them. The sitting presents 195 questions — 165 scored plus 30 unscored pilot questions — across four categories at ARRT’s published counts: Patient Care 21, Safety 21, Image Production 52, and Procedures 71, under the specifications in effect since September 1, 2026. Scores are reported on a 1–99 scale, and a scaled score of 75 passes — a standard this guide explains exactly.
The real exam at a glance
| Fact of record | ARRT Computed Tomography |
|---|---|
| Scored questions | 165 |
| Pilot questions | 30 additional unscored questions (195 presented) |
| Testing time | 195 minutes of testing time within a 3-hour 35-minute appointment |
| Delivery | Pearson VUE, computer-based |
| Content categories (scored) | Patient Care 21 · Safety 21 · Image Production 52 · Procedures 71 |
| Passing score | Total scaled score of 75 on a 1–99 scale |
| Eligibility pathway | Postprimary — supporting credential + ethics + structured education + clinical experience |
| Exam window | 365 days from application approval, per ARRT’s handbook record |
This guide states no examination fee for ARRT. ARRT publishes its current application fees in its handbooks and application materials, and those publications — not any preparation page — are where the current figure belongs.
The postprimary pathway, step by step
Step 1 — the supporting credential. You must hold current ARRT registration in Radiography, Nuclear Medicine Technology, or Radiation Therapy. For the nuclear medicine route, an NMTCB credential is also accepted as the supporting credential. There is no way around this step and no substitute experience that replaces it: the pathway is built for technologists extending an existing credential into CT.
Step 2 — ethics. Candidates must meet ARRT’s Standards of Ethics requirements, as with every ARRT credential.
Step 3 — structured education. Sixteen hours of ARRT-recognized structured education activities in CT, including at least one credit hour in each of the four content categories — Patient Care, Safety, Image Production, and Procedures. The hours must be completed within the 24 months immediately before you submit your application. Education older than that window does not count, which makes sequencing a real planning task: take the education too early and the clinical documentation cannot ripen inside the same window; too late and the exam date slips.
Step 4 — clinical experience. ARRT’s clinical experience requirements list 67 procedures in six categories (head, spine, and musculoskeletal; neck and chest; abdomen and pelvis; additional procedures; image display and postprocessing; quality assurance). You must choose at least 25 different procedures, document 3 to 5 repetitions of each chosen procedure, reach a minimum of 125 repetitions in total, and include at least 30 repetitions performed with iodinated IV contrast media. Each documented procedure must be a complete, diagnostic-quality study you performed with the patient and equipment physically present — ARRT expressly does not accept remote scanning for clinical requirements — and the whole body of experience must fall within the same 24-month pre-application window.
Step 5 — the examination. Apply, receive your window, and sit at a Pearson VUE center. ARRT allows three attempts within three years under its examination limits — a fact worth knowing before the first attempt, not after it: the first sitting deserves full preparation precisely because the allowance is finite.
The format, honestly
ARRT examinations are computer-based tests consisting mainly of multiple-choice items, delivered at Pearson VUE centers with a tutorial before the scored time begins. The CT sitting presents scored and pilot questions in a single mixed sequence — the 30 pilot questions are not identified, and they appear throughout rather than in a block, so there is no point in the sitting at which you can know a question “doesn’t count.” Questions are not grouped by content category: a procedures question can follow a dose question can follow a contrast question, which is itself a preparation instruction — study in mixed order once the categories are learned, because the sitting will not respect your study blocks. The 195-minute testing time works out to one minute per presented question, a pace that rewards decisive answering on recall items so that calculation and image-judgment items can take the time they need.
The four categories, piece by piece
Patient Care — 21 scored questions
The current specifications carry a single subcategory: Patient Interactions and Management (21). Its ground: patient assessment and preparation; indications and contraindications awareness; preprocedure medications; contrast media and medication administration, including screening for contrast risk, IV access, injection considerations, and recognition and management of contrast reactions; monitoring during and after the procedure; postprocedure instructions; and infection control in the CT suite. The category’s questions are clinical-judgment questions — a screening step skipped, a reaction unfolding, a medication interaction — and their common thread is that the technologist’s preparation and vigilance are the procedure’s safety system before any image exists.
Safety — 21 scored questions
Also a single subcategory: Radiation Safety and Dose (21). Its ground runs from radiation physics — x-ray production and interaction as they bear on protection — to radiation protection in practice: minimizing patient exposure, dose measurement and description including CTDIvol and dose-length product (DLP), dose optimization techniques such as automatic exposure control and protocol selection, shielding and personnel protection, and heightened care for dose-sensitive patients, including pediatric and pregnant patients. CT delivers the highest doses in diagnostic radiography, and this category is ARRT testing whether the technologist extending into CT understands the modality’s central responsibility. Twenty-one questions is a small count with a long professional shadow; study it beyond its weight.
Image Production — 52 scored questions
Two subcategories. Image Formation (30): the scanner itself — CT system components, data acquisition methods, reconstruction, processing, and display — and how acquisition choices become image characteristics. Image Evaluation and Archiving (22): judging the result — image quality parameters (spatial and contrast resolution, noise, uniformity), artifacts and their causes and corrections, window settings and postprocessing, image display and archiving, and quality assurance. This is the category where technologists whose CT experience is protocol-driven but physics-light are most exposed: the questions ask not “which button” but “why this image looks this way and what change fixes it.” At 52 questions it is the exam’s second-largest category, and together with Procedures it defines the sitting.
Procedures — 71 scored questions
Three regional groups. Head, Spine, and Musculoskeletal (25): neuro and spinal imaging, sinus and temporal bone work, spine protocols, and musculoskeletal studies. Neck and Chest (22): neck soft-tissue studies, chest imaging including high-resolution and cardiac-adjacent work, and the contrast timing those studies live by. Abdomen and Pelvis (24): abdominal and pelvic protocols, multiphase imaging, CT colonography and the specification’s newer procedure additions, and the anatomy that decides whether a study answers its clinical question. Across all three groups the tested knowledge is the same weave: cross-sectional anatomy, patient positioning, protocol selection and parameters, scan range, and contrast phase — asked study by study, the way the work arrives. Seventy-one questions, 43% of the scored exam: the category is the job, sampled.
Scoring, stated exactly
ARRT reports examination scores on a scale from 1 to 99, and a total scaled score of 75 is required to pass. ARRT is explicit about what that number is not: it is not a percentage. The number of correct answers needed to earn a scaled 75 varies from one exam version to another, because scaled scoring adjusts for version difficulty — ARRT’s own illustration is that one version might require 131 of 200 correct while a harder version requires 130 for the same scaled score. Two consequences for candidates. First, there is no raw target to aim at: “get 75% right in practice” is a study heuristic, not a conversion, and this guide labels it that way wherever it appears — where PassProfessor practice scoring uses 70, it is a PRACTICE BENCHMARK ONLY, a readiness target we set, never ARRT’s standard. Second, the standard is whole-exam: your scaled score is computed on total performance, so a weak category is a drag on the total rather than a separate failure — and a strength elsewhere is the only compensation available. Breadth is not a virtue here; it is the arithmetic.
Keeping the credential
ARRT certification and registration renew on ARRT’s continuing-education cycle, and CT technologists working toward or holding multiple ARRT credentials should track ARRT’s current renewal and continuing-education rules in its official publications, together with any state licensing requirements that apply to their practice. This guide deliberately states no fee or hour figures for renewal: ARRT revised its renewal fee structure effective January 2026, and the governing figures are the ones in ARRT’s current handbook at the time you renew.
What this program costs, and what this guide does not price
No price is stated for PassProfessor’s ARRT CT Exam Prep, and this guide publishes none. The program is in development; when a price is decided it will be the PassProfessor program price only. This guide likewise states no ARRT examination or application fee: ARRT publishes its current fees in its own materials, and its publications are where the current figures live.
How to study for the CT exam
- Build the calendar backward from the 24-month window. Structured education and clinical repetitions must both land inside it. Decide the application month first; let it dictate when education is taken, when repetitions are logged, and when exam preparation peaks.
- Plan from the published counts. Procedures 71, Image Production 52, Patient Care 21, Safety 21. Your calendar should resemble that table more than it resembles your comfort — most candidates find their instinct over-weights protocols and under-weights physics.
- Study Image Production as cause and effect. For every image characteristic, learn what acquisition or reconstruction choice produces it and what change alters it. The category’s questions are diagnosis-of-the-image questions; memorized definitions do not survive them.
- Learn procedures by region and by phase. Anatomy, positioning, protocol, contrast phase — as one bundle per study, because the questions arrive bundled. The newer specification’s added procedures deserve explicit coverage; outlines reward candidates who study the current version, which is why this guide is built on the September 1, 2026 specifications.
- Give Safety its professional weight, not just its count. Dose descriptors, optimization, and protection are 21 questions and also the content your future practice is judged by; learn them to fluency rather than to recognition.
- Mix the categories once each is learned. The sitting does not group questions by category. Mixed timed sets are the bridge between knowing the material and retrieving it in the sitting’s order.
- Rehearse at the sitting’s pace. 195 questions in 195 minutes. Practice deciding quickly on recall items and marking the genuinely hard ones — the clock is a category of its own, and it is the only one every candidate sits.
PassProfessor’s ARRT CT program — preparation organized on ARRT’s current CT content specifications across all four categories — is in development. The ARRT CT Exam Prep program page carries the notify list; join it and we will email you when enrollment opens. The program will also be listed from the Allied Health Exam Prep hub alongside the other allied-health programs in the catalog.
Specification changes: why the date on the outline matters
ARRT revises its content specifications on a cycle, and CT’s current specifications — Board approved in July 2025, implemented September 1, 2026 — rebalanced the examination: Image Production rose from 50 to 52 scored questions while Patient Care and Safety each moved from 22 to 21, and the Procedures total held at 71 with its regional mix restated, alongside content additions that include procedures such as CT colonography and esophagram-type studies and practice elements such as time-out, power injection, adverse-event reporting, and informatics. The practical lesson is not the arithmetic; it is the habit. Preparation materials built on superseded specifications misallocate your hours by exactly the differences above and omit what the current outline added. Before you study from anything — including this catalog — check the implementation date on its source outline against the exam date on your application. Candidates are examined on the specifications in force for their sitting, and “recent” material built on the old map is wrong in ways its authors may not have noticed.
After the exam: results, retakes, and the credential in practice
ARRT scores and reports results after the sitting rather than handing you a verdict at the test center door; plan employer start dates and any next steps around ARRT’s reporting, not around the appointment. A pass adds the CT credential to your ARRT record alongside your supporting credential — the postprimary design means the two live together, and maintaining the supporting registration is part of keeping the whole record in good standing under ARRT’s rules. If a first attempt falls short, ARRT’s limits — three attempts within three years — frame the retake plan: use the score feedback to identify the category that cost the total, rebuild narrowly against the specifications, and treat the second sitting as a different exam taken by a better-prepared candidate rather than a repeat of the first. The technologists who earn this credential share a recognizable profile: their preparation covered physics with the same seriousness as protocols, and their clinical repetitions were documented early enough that paperwork never raced the exam date. Both halves of that profile are available to any candidate who plans the pathway as one project — which is the single most useful sentence in this guide.
Where candidates lose points they knew
Post-sitting accounts of this examination repeat a recognizable shortlist, and it is worth reading before your study plan hardens. Protocol richness, physics poverty leads it: working technologists arrive with thousands of real scans behind them and a corresponding confidence in Procedures — then meet Image Production’s questions about why an image degrades, what a reconstruction choice changes, and how acquisition parameters trade against each other, at a depth the console never required them to articulate. The repair is unglamorous: study formation and evaluation as a physics course, not as a review of settings you already use. Dose by habit is second: Safety’s items test the descriptors and optimization logic — CTDIvol, DLP, automatic exposure control behavior, protocol-level dose decisions — that experienced operators often handle by inherited protocol rather than by principle; the exam asks for the principle. Anatomy at the slice level is third: Procedures assumes cross-sectional anatomy read in the axial plane at speed, and candidates whose anatomy study was regional and diagrammatic find the exam’s presentation of it slower to parse than expected; slice-level drilling is its own study block, not a by-product of protocol study. The paperwork race closes the list and is the only item that can defeat a candidate before the sitting: repetitions logged late, education hours discovered to fall outside the 24-month window, an application filed against a deadline the documentation cannot meet. Every other failure on this list is recoverable with study. That one is recoverable only with a calendar — which is why this guide put the pathway first and the categories second.
The specifications as a study contract
It is worth pausing on what ARRT’s publication of exact scored counts gives you, because most licensing examinations do not offer it. A specification that says Procedures 71, Image Production 52, Patient Care 21, Safety 21 is a complete allocation instruction: it tells you the exchange rate between study hours and score with unusual honesty, and it removes the most common excuse for misallocated preparation — uncertainty about what the exam emphasizes. The candidates who use it well do two things. They budget by it literally at the start, letting the counts rather than their confidence assign the first month of hours — confidence is a lagging indicator that mostly measures familiarity, while the counts measure the exam. And they re-audit against it at the end: a final week rebalanced toward whichever category timed practice says is thinnest relative to its count, not whichever subject feels most pleasant to revisit. An examination that publishes its own blueprint this precisely is making an offer; the whole of this guide’s study advice is, in one sense, instructions for accepting it.
A note on contrast: the thread that runs through three categories
Candidates mapping the specifications for the first time often notice that contrast media appears everywhere — and the observation is a study instruction. Patient Care examines contrast as a clinical act: screening, indications, risk factors, venous access, reaction recognition and response, and postprocedure care. Procedures examines contrast as a timing act: phases, delays, and injection parameters that decide whether a study demonstrates what it was ordered to show. Image Production touches it as image quality: enhancement patterns, artifacts, and the evaluation of whether enhancement achieved its diagnostic purpose. The same body of knowledge is examined in three grammars, and preparation that studies contrast once, in one grammar, underperforms in the other two. Study it three times, once per category’s question — what do I do for the patient, when do I inject for the study, what does the resulting image prove — and the thread becomes what it is in practice: one competence, viewed from the three positions a CT technologist actually occupies in a single working hour.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions are on the ARRT CT exam? 165 scored questions plus 30 unscored pilot questions — 195 presented in total, with 195 minutes of testing time inside a 3-hour 35-minute appointment at Pearson VUE.
What are the category counts? Patient Care 21; Safety 21; Image Production 52 (Image Formation 30, Image Evaluation and Archiving 22); Procedures 71 (Head, Spine, and Musculoskeletal 25; Neck and Chest 22; Abdomen and Pelvis 24) — under the specifications in effect since September 1, 2026.
What score do I need to pass? A total scaled score of 75 on ARRT’s 1–99 scale, as ARRT publishes it. It is not a percentage; ARRT states the number of correct answers behind a scaled 75 varies by exam version. In PassProfessor practice scoring, 70 is a PRACTICE BENCHMARK ONLY.
Who can take the CT exam? Holders of a supporting credential — ARRT registration in Radiography, Nuclear Medicine Technology, or Radiation Therapy (NMTCB accepted for the nuclear medicine route) — who meet ARRT’s ethics requirements. CT is a postprimary credential, not an entry-level one.
What structured education and clinical experience are required? 16 hours of structured education with at least one hour in each content category, and documented clinical experience of at least 125 repetitions across at least 25 different procedures from ARRT’s 67-procedure list (3–5 repetitions counted per procedure; at least 30 with iodinated IV contrast) — both completed within the 24 months before application.
How many attempts do I get? ARRT allows three attempts within three years under its examination limits. Prepare the first attempt as if it were the only one.
Is the CT credential a license to practice? No. ARRT certification is a national credential. State requirements for practicing as a CT technologist are set by states separately; ARRT’s credential and your state’s rules are different instruments, and both can apply to you.
What does the PassProfessor program cost, and what does the exam cost? No price is stated for the program, and this guide publishes none. This guide also states no ARRT examination fee; ARRT publishes its current fees in its own materials.
How many practice questions will PassProfessor’s program include? This guide states no count. The program and its bank are in development and are not presented as finished; its stated ground is ARRT’s current CT content specifications across all four categories.
Are PassProfessor’s questions ARRT’s actual exam questions? No. Program questions are written for PassProfessor to ARRT’s content specifications. We never use actual examination items, recalled items, or another provider’s material.
When will the PassProfessor program be available? It is in development as part of the expanding PassProfessor catalog. Join the notify list on this page or on the program page, and we will email you when enrollment opens. No date is promised that we cannot keep.
Disclaimer
PassProfessor is an independent exam-preparation provider; ARRT does not endorse this program, and PassProfessor is not affiliated with or sponsored by the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists. ARRT is used in this guide as a factual reference to ARRT’s credential. This guide is general information about examination preparation, current as of November 2026; it provides no clinical instruction or patient-care advice, satisfies none of ARRT’s structured-education or clinical-experience requirements, and confers no certification. The credential is awarded solely by ARRT to candidates who meet its requirements, and ARRT’s official publications govern if anything here differs from them.