The Red Seal exam pass mark.

01What is the pass mark?

Seventy percent, stated plainly in the Red Seal Program's Exam Preparation Guide. The number does not change from trade to trade or from province to province. The same guide sets out the rest of the marking rules:

• One mark per question. A hard question and an easy one are worth the same. No weighting by difficulty.
• Four options, one correct answer. The guide is explicit that there are no trick questions, though the wrong options are not always obvious.
• No penalty for a wrong answer. Nothing is subtracted for guessing, which is why the guide tells candidates to answer every question.
• Four hours of writing time. The guide suggests dividing 240 minutes by your trade's question count to set your pace.

The pass mark is therefore a plain count: correct answers divided by total questions.

02How many questions must you get right?

Because the question count differs by trade, 70 percent is a different raw score in each one. The table uses the question counts the Red Seal Program publishes on each trade's exam information page, with 70 percent rounded up to the next whole question.

The names above are the national ones. Ontario certifies some of these trades under its own names and codes: Truck and Transport Mechanic is Ontario's Truck and Coach Technician, 310T, Construction Electrician is Ontario's 309A, and Industrial Mechanic (Millwright) is Ontario's Industrial Mechanic Millwright, 433A. The interprovincial paper is the same either way.

Note the time pressure behind the numbers. On a 135-question exam you can miss 40 and still pass, but you have to find 95 correct answers inside four hours.

03Is the mark scaled or curved?

The official Exam Preparation Guide gives a fixed pass mark of 70 percent. It does not describe a curve, a scaled score, or any adjustment based on how other candidates performed.

We will not claim more than the published material supports. What the guide does say is that the number of questions drawn from each part of the occupational standard is set in advance by tradespeople from across Canada, so the shape of the paper is fixed before anyone sits it. Your official mark is released by the provincial or territorial authority that administered your exam.

04How and when do results arrive?

Red Seal examinations are administered by provincial and territorial apprenticeship and certification authorities, as the Red Seal Program's registration page states, and results follow the same route. There is no published national turnaround time, so the answer depends on where you wrote.

Ontario is a useful worked example. Skilled Trades Ontario's exam preparation guide says that if you have an email address on file you will be notified by email once your exam has been marked, your results can then be viewed online through the Skilled Trades Ontario Portal, and the results are also emailed to you. With no email address on file, results are mailed. It also states that results cannot be given over the phone.

If you wrote elsewhere, check your own authority's page rather than assuming Ontario's process applies.

05What happens if you do not pass?

You can write again. Rewrite rules, waiting periods, fees and any limit on attempts are set by each province and territory, not by the Red Seal Program, so there is no single national answer. Confirm the rule where you wrote. We compare the wait, the rewrite fee and the limit on attempts for every province and territory in what happens if you fail the Red Seal exam.

In Ontario, Skilled Trades Ontario's exam preparation guide says a candidate who did not pass can re-write, and that challenging the exam more than once is not uncommon. You will be allowed to schedule another examination 30 days after your previous examination date and write on the 31st day or thereafter if a seat is available, unless the exam has been blocked pending an investigation of misconduct. A fee is payable for each attempt.

06Why can a practice score mislead you?

Hitting 85 percent on a practice test does not mean you are 15 points clear of the pass mark. It means you scored 85 percent on that test.

The gap usually comes from the mix of question types. A bank stuffed with recall questions — name the part, state the value — is pleasant to score well on, but the exam is not built that way. The official guide describes three kinds of knowledge tested: recall, procedural and application, and critical thinking, with the last two carrying the weight in most trades. Across the trades we cover, recall is usually 5 to 20 percent of the paper; the rest is procedure, calculation, diagram work and fault diagnosis.

The guide is blunt about outside practice questions too: memorizing them may not help, and it recommends using them to find weak areas and to work out why each wrong option is wrong. That is the honest use of a practice score, a map of where to study rather than a prediction. It is also why our tests are weighted to the published breakdown for each trade, question type included — the method is on how our questions are made.

07Common questions

08Sources

• Red Seal Program: Red Seal Exam Preparation Guide — the 70 percent pass mark, one mark per question, four options with one correct answer, no trick questions, the four-hour writing time, the advice to answer every question, the three question types, and the warning about outside practice questions.
• Red Seal Program: Red Seal exam registration — that Red Seal examinations are administered by provincial and territorial apprenticeship and certification authorities.
• Skilled Trades Ontario: Trade Examinations in Ontario, Exam Preparation Guide (June 2023, PDF) — how Ontario releases results, and the Ontario rewrite rule.
• Red Seal Program exam information pages, for the question counts in the table: Automotive Service Technician 125, Truck and Transport Mechanic 135, Construction Electrician 100, Carpenter 100, Heavy Duty Equipment Technician 135, Hairstylist 120.

09Practice for this exam

Every TicketPrep practice test is weighted to the official exam breakdown for its trade, so your score tracks the real paper. Every answer explains all four options, and it is free to try with no account.

Related: all guides · fees and rules by province · how our questions are made