Most free UT question sets test whether you can recite a velocity or a formula. The Level II paper asks what you would do at the scan, and that is where candidates lose marks.
What do these free ASNT UT Level II practice questions test?
The three questions further down are original, and each has a full explanation you can open once you have committed to an answer. They come from the same free sample behind the scored ASNT UT quiz.
One is about reporting. A weld seam can only be reached from one side, and the procedure assumes two. One is about technique selection on a bonded honeycomb panel. One is about why a procedure tells you to scan a weld root at half skip with an angle beam probe.
No question asks you to recall a table. None. Each one hands you a job and asks for the sound move. Our channel has the ASNT Level II ultrasonic exam in sixty seconds if you want the format first.
ASNT UT II — The ASNT Level II ultrasonic exam in sixty seconds. Watch on YouTube · CertCrafter How is the ASNT UT Level II exam built?
To earn ASNT NDT Level II certification you pass two computer-based exams. The General exam covers the method and has 50 items in 2 hours. The Specific exam covers applied knowledge for General Industry or Pressure Equipment Sectors and has 40 items in 2 hours. Our product data lists both as closed book.
ASNT also says employers carry out the visual acuity, practical and any job-specific exams their written practice needs. Passing both papers is one door, not the finish line, and plenty of candidates plan the study carefully and the practical badly.
The General outline is changing. ASNT lists one UT outline for exams prior to 5 February 2027 and another for exams after it, both at 50 items in 2 hours. Check which one your booking falls under before you study.
What does the exam cost, and what does a miss cost?
ASNT’s fee table lists an initial UT exam, General and Specific together, at $740 for members and $820 for nonmembers. A retake of a failed UT exam is $370 for members and $410 for nonmembers.
After a fail you wait 30 days, reapply and pay through MyCert, and need a new approval letter before you can schedule. Money is the smaller cost. Time is the bigger one. A project start that hangs on your certificate does not move because your retake window did.
How should you work through the three questions?
Cover the options. Say what you would do on site, in a sentence, before you read anything. Then match that sentence to an option. Candidates who read the options first get pulled toward the one that sounds most technical.
Open the explanation after you pick, and read it even when you were right, because the reasoning in it is worth more than the letter. Each wrong option in this set is a move that people make on a real job, and each has a reason it fails.
What happens when you cannot reach the whole weld?
Picture a seam half covered by a welded support. The procedure was written for access from both sides. Nobody on a plant wants to be the person who writes that up, because it opens a conversation about schedule.
You write it up anyway. Always. A limitation is a finding in its own right, and an examination report that hides one is a false statement. The Level II does not decide what happens next, but has to hand over enough detail for someone else to decide.
Worked example: reporting a one-sided seam
- Scan every length you can reach, to the procedure as written.
- Mark the length you could not cover and measure where it starts and stops.
- Record the coverage you did get, and the angle and side it came from.
- Raise it with the Level III and the Authorized Inspector while an alternative, such as scanning from the inside or another method, is still possible.
Notice what is absent. You do not call it fully examined, you do not reject the weld, and you do not add gain to make up for geometry.
The ASNT UT Level II practice test bundle works more of these under timed conditions, with every answer explained.
Why is a weld root scanned at half skip?
The root of a single-sided weld sits where the far surface meets the vertical face of an unfused or unfilled root. At half skip, the beam reaches that junction still on its first leg. The two surfaces meet at right angles, so they act as a corner and send energy back along the way it came.
That is why root cracks and lack of penetration make such strong reflectors, and why the instruction is in the procedure instead of left to chance. A wrong option in the third question says half skip is about attenuation. The path is shorter, true, but that is a side benefit, not the reason.
Where do candidates lose marks on questions like these?
Three habits show up. First, reaching for a tool when the answer is a report or a referral. Second, picking a wave mode because it sounds clever, as with shear waves in adhesive, which are heavily attenuated there. Third, choosing a statement that is true about ultrasonics in general but is not the reason this particular procedure gives, which is a quiet way to lose a mark you knew the physics for.
The honeycomb question rewards a different idea. Thin skins ring in pulse echo, so the multiples crowd the part of the timebase where the bond line sits. Measuring how much energy crosses the panel gets round that problem.
How should you use three free questions?
Not as a readiness test, and not as a score. Three questions cannot tell you whether you will pass, but they can expose a habit. Log every miss by topic and by the kind of slip: the reason, the authority, the wave mode or the outline.
Then read the certification guide for the route and exam facts, and the study guides hub for the other posts. The common mistakes post and the UT physics post cover the setup reasoning behind these.
Next step: open the three questions, answer each in one sentence before you see the options, and score yourself on the reason as well as the letter.
Comments
Comments are read by a person before they appear. How we moderate.