The ISTQB CT-PT exam has 40 questions, 90 minutes, and 26 of 40 points (65%) to pass. ExamCaliber has 123 free ISTQB CT-PT practice questions in 3 full-length mock exams of 40 questions, 90 minutes and 65% to pass — every answer, right and wrong, carries a written rationale. No sign-up, no paywall.
40 multiple-choice questions, each worth exactly one point, for 40 points in total. Because the weighting is uniform, counting questions and counting points is the same thing on this exam.
26 of the 40 questions, which is 65%. You can afford 14 wrong answers. On a paper this short that margin disappears quickly — one weak chapter and one careless calculation is most of it.
90 minutes. If the exam language is not your native language you are entitled to 25% extra time — a further 22 or 23 minutes, so 113 in total. Request it when you book. If you see 60 minutes quoted somewhere, that is an outdated figure that survives in some third-party tables; the certification page and the current exam-structure tables both give 90.
Yes. The syllabus is explicit: the Foundation Level Core certificate shall be obtained before taking the Performance Testing exam. There is no way around it and no equivalent-experience waiver at the ISTQB level.
No. Unlike the Advanced Level certifications, CT-PT sets no experience requirement — CTFL is the only formal prerequisite. That said, the largest chapter is about performing the tasks, and candidates who have actually run a load test find those questions much easier than candidates who have only read about them.
The 2018 edition, and it is still the current one as of mid-2026 — ISTQB has not published a successor. The download page for CT-PT offers that syllabus plus an official sample exam, nothing newer. Check the footer date on anything claiming to be a more recent edition.
ISTQB publishes the split, and it is heavily weighted: Performance Testing Tasks is half the exam on its own, while Basic Concepts, Performance Measurement Fundamentals, Performance Testing in the Software Lifecycle and Tools share the other half. The exact per-chapter counts are shown in the weights panel on our CT-PT pages, and they are the official numbers rather than our estimates.
Yes. Nine of the 40 questions are at K4 (analysis) level and four more at K3 (apply), and most of the analytical ones involve numbers: throughput, percentiles, reading load profiles, and diagnosing a bottleneck from a set of metrics. Learn the throughput formula — virtual users divided by processing time plus think time — and get comfortable with the 90th percentile rather than the mean.
No, and that is unusual for ISTQB. Despite spanning K1 to K4, every CT-PT question is worth one point. A percentile calculation that takes you four minutes pays the same as a definition you answer in fifteen seconds, which is worth remembering when you budget your 90 minutes.
Five examinable chapters. Basic Concepts (performance efficiency under ISO 25010, the principles, the eight performance test types, static and dynamic testing, load generation, failure modes); Performance Measurement Fundamentals (metric categories, aggregation, sources, and what a result actually tells you); Performance Testing in the Software Lifecycle (activities, architecture risk categories, lifecycle models); Performance Testing Tasks (planning, analysis and design, implementation, execution, analysis and reporting); and Tools (tool types, licensing models, suitability).
No. The tools chapter is vendor-neutral: it asks about categories of tool — load generators, the load management console, monitoring tools — the three licensing models, and the four suitability factors of compatibility, scalability, understandability and monitoring. No question requires knowledge of a particular product's syntax or UI. Hands-on experience with any load testing tool still helps, because it makes concepts like correlation and think time concrete.
It is the same certification; the naming has shifted over time. The file names and older mirrors sometimes label it CTFL-PT or Foundation Level Performance Testing, and ISTQB now presents it as a specialist certification under the CT-PT code. It is one syllabus, not two competing ones.
The syllabus prescribes roughly 875 minutes — about 14.5 hours — of teaching time, over half of which belongs to the tasks chapter. For someone already working in testing, four weeks at six to eight hours a week is a realistic self-study plan, with the last two weeks spent almost entirely on the tasks chapter. Someone with no load-testing exposure at all should plan closer to six weeks and get hands on a tool.
ISTQB does not set a single worldwide price. The fee comes from the national member board or accredited exam provider you book through, so it varies by country and by whether you sit remotely or in a test centre — the current figure is on that provider's page.
No, and nobody has real ones legitimately — ISTQB does not release live exam content. Ours are original questions written against the published syllabus, with a written rationale on every answer option including the wrong ones. Our mocks use the real format and scoring — 40 questions, one point each, 90 minutes, 65% to pass — so a percentage means exactly what it appears to mean. ISTQB also publishes one official sample exam, and it is worth doing alongside ours.
80% or better, under the clock, on a mock you have not seen before. A single pass at 65% is the threshold itself, with no reserve for a bad morning or one arithmetic slip. Also check the shape of your score, not just the total: because the tasks chapter is half the exam, being weak there cannot be compensated by being strong everywhere else.