NPPE Practice Questions 2026: Free Sample, Answers Explained by Area

The NPPE tests whether you can apply law, ethics and professional practice to situations an engineer or geoscientist meets at work. This page gives you two practice questions in the exam's format, each answer explained from the rule it rests on, then what each of the six blueprint areas asks about and how to practise and score yourself the way the NPPE is marked.

ProSyllabus is an independent study site. We are not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Engineers Canada, APEGA, Meazure Learning or any provincial or territorial regulator; every rule below is quoted or summarised from their published pages, and your regulator decides every individual case.

Every NPPE question is multiple choice with four options and only one correct answer. Each is scored 0 or 1 and there is no penalty for guessing, so a blank answer can only cost you. Of the 110 questions, 100 are scored and 10 are experimental questions that are not scored; you cannot tell which is which, so treat every question as if it counts. The exam is closed book, lasts 2.5 hours, and you can switch between English and French at any time. The official site says the exam is checked to read at about a grade 10-11 level; it is not a test of English.

Many questions describe a situation and ask what the professional should do, which duty applies, or how a court or regulator would treat it. Recognising the rule is not enough: you have to pick the option that applies it correctly to the facts given.

Why it matters: conflicts of interest appear in several blueprint topics (II.3, II.4 and III.2), and each code words the rule its own way. Ontario's Code of Ethics requires immediate disclosure to the client of any interest that might be construed as prejudicial to your judgement; the EGBC Code requires you to avoid real or perceived conflicts, disclose them properly and take measures so they do not bias your recommendations; and the Engineers Canada guideline says that where full disclosure is insufficient, or could be seen to be insufficient, you should withdraw totally from the issue and/or use extraordinary means involving independent parties.

Why it matters: the formal tendering and bid process is a listed contract-law topic in the blueprint (IV.2), and engineers often prepare and evaluate tenders. Ron Engineering is the starting point for "Contract A" and "Contract B"; later Supreme Court decisions refine when a Contract A arises: M.J.B. Enterprises (1999) ties it to the intentions of the parties, and Tercon (2010) to the express and implied terms of the tender call.

The 2017 blueprint gives a range of questions for each area. Read it as a guide to weight, not a fixed split: the blueprint page says any listed topic can be tested to a greater or lesser extent in each exam.

In our experience writing NPPE-style questions, the law areas (IV and V) reward knowing the exact rule, such as a limitation period, a holdback percentage or what a privilege clause can and cannot do, while the ethics and practice areas (II and III) reward reading the scenario carefully: who the professional owes the duty to, whether the risk reaches the public, and what the first step is. That is our advice, not the NPPE's.

The NPPE pass mark is an equated (scaled) score of 65. The official Results page says this is NOT the same as answering 65% of questions correctly, because statistical equating adjusts for differences in difficulty between exam forms, and that an equated NPPE score cannot be reverse-calculated from the percentage scores in a mastery report. Each exam is scored with no predetermined share of candidates passing or failing.

The NPPE program sells its own online practice tests through its practice test site. The official page says they use the same testing platform as the real exam, that their questions were previously administered on past NPPE exams, and that every candidate gets a diagnostic report by blueprint area with a rationale for each question. It also says their difficulty is not identical to the real exam and that passing one is not a guarantee of passing the NPPE. Registered candidates also get free access to a tutorial of the exam interface several weeks before their exam date.