What's on the Court Interpreter Written Exam: All 135 Questions, Part by Part

Written & reviewed by Quibank Editor · Last reviewed 2026-10-16 · Editorial standards

The court interpreter written exam that many state courts use, the one developed by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), is 135 four-choice questions in three parts: 75 on general English, 50 on court-related terms and usage, and 10 on ethics. You pass with 80%, which the state overviews spell out as at least 108 of the 135 correct.

What most candidates don't expect is that split: it is easy to assume a court exam is mostly law, but more than half of it is English vocabulary and idioms that never mention a courtroom. This piece walks through each section as the official candidate overviews describe it, what the 108 cutoff means in practice, and the rules that differ from state to state.

Part 1: 75 English questions, and 25 of them are idioms

Washington's 2026 candidate overview, adapted from the Consortium for Language Access in the Courts, lays out Part 1 item by item. Items 1-9 are sentence completion, 10-17 are synonyms in context (a sample asks what "pursuant to" means in a court sentence), 18-38 are stand-alone synonyms, 39-50 are antonyms, and 51-75 are idioms.

That last block is the largest single section on the exam: 25 idiom questions, more than the whole ethics part and Part 2's ten direct court questions put together. The official samples ask what it means to "make a pit stop" or that a career is "all washed up." None of them is legal, so no amount of glossary study prepares you for this block.

The synonym samples are not legal either. One asks for the meaning of "hubris," another "scaffold." Washington's own preparation list sends candidates to SAT reading and writing practice, GRE prep books and TOEFL materials for this part, which tells you what level the program thinks it is testing.

Part 2: 50 court questions, mostly from criminal cases

Items 76-111 are sentence completions built from things "likely to be heard in the court environment," and the overview says the legal terms in items 76-125 are taken largely from criminal case types. One sample asks what a case decided "without prejudice" means (there is a right to a new trial); another asks when a defendant gives up certain constitutional rights (before entering a guilty plea).

Items 112-121 are direct court-related questions. The sample is a concurrent-sentence item: two years for burglary and two for robbery served as two years total. Items 122-125 are sequence questions, where the right answer puts events in order, such as jury sworn, then jury charge, then deliberation, then verdict.

The sequence items reward knowing a case end to end rather than knowing definitions. If you can narrate a felony case from arrest through arraignment, plea, trial and sentencing, the four sequence questions and many of the sentence completions fall out of that one mental model.

Part 3: 10 ethics questions, mostly scenarios

Items 126-127 ask about professional conduct, and items 128-135 are short scenarios. The official sample scenario has an expert testifying about blood alcohol content in technical language the defendant seems not to follow. The best answer is to interpret at the same level as the witness, not to summarize, explain or alert the judge.

That sample captures the pattern: the right choice is usually the one that keeps you a faithful conduit, even when another option feels more helpful. Ten questions is only about 7% of the exam, so learn the conduit rule well and move on.

What 108 out of 135 means for your study plan

Because the pass mark is one combined score, the sections trade off. You can miss 27 questions in total. A candidate who answers all 60 court and ethics questions correctly still needs 48 of the 75 English items, about 64%. A candidate strong in English who gets 70 of 75 can afford to miss 22 of the 60 legal items.

In practice that means the English part decides most outcomes. If your vocabulary is already at a graduate-reading level, spend your time on criminal procedure and terminology. If it is not, idioms and synonyms will move your score more than a second pass through a legal glossary.

Time is rarely the problem. New Jersey's overview (revised September 2026) allows 2 hours 15 minutes, the same as Michigan's January 2025 overview, and reports that the average candidate finishes in 80 minutes and only 2% use the full time.

Same exam, different rules by state

The questions come from the same NCSC product, but fees, retake waits and even the order of steps are set by each court. Examples from the current official documents:

Washington (2026 overview): $91 non-refundable, offered year-round at testing centers, at least six months between attempts, and no limit on how many times you retake.
New Jersey (September 2026 revision): $50, a one-year wait after a failed attempt and a maximum of six attempts; results stay valid for two years, and once you test in New Jersey you must retest there.
Wisconsin: $75 for first-timers and $50 for repeat takers, two test dates a year, a six-month wait after failing, and the two-day orientation comes before the written exam rather than after it.
Pennsylvania (overview revised April 2015): adds a 10-item translation exercise into your working language, one hour, no dictionaries; if you fail the multiple-choice part, the translation is not rated. Check the court's current page, since that document is a decade old.

What passing does, and what it doesn't

Every overview says the same thing: passing does not make you a certified interpreter. Wisconsin calls the written exam a screening test for eligibility to sit for the oral exam. New Jersey adds that the written result has no effect on the Master, Journey or Conditional classification you earn from the oral exam, which is the skills test that actually ranks you.

For the court half of the exam, the free Quibank bank drills the material Parts 2 and 3 draw on: the legal terminology pool covers the criminal-court vocabulary and the ethics pool covers the conduct scenarios. It does not cover Part 1's general English, which is better trained with SAT- or GRE-level vocabulary work. The podcast episode on how certification works covers the full path from written exam to oral.

Try the free court interpreter practice test →