Part 107 Test Overview and Strategy

Computer-based, delivered through PSI test centers

The FAA Part 107 Unmanned Aircraft General – Small (UAG) knowledge test is a computer-based test delivered at an approved testing center run by PSI Services, the FAA's designated third-party testing vendor for this exam. This is different from many other professional exams that are proctored on paper or delivered directly by the certifying agency — a Part 107 candidate schedules an appointment through PSI, arrives at a physical test center with acceptable identification, and takes the test at a computer workstation under staff supervision. There is no online, at-home, or open-book version of this test; it must be taken in person at a PSI-approved facility.

The test consists of 60 scored multiple-choice questions, each with four answer choices, drawn from a live question bank that the FAA does not publish (see FAA-SOURCE-MATERIALS.md for the full explanation of what the FAA does and does not release publicly). A candidate has a 2-hour time limit to complete all 60 questions, which works out to an average of exactly 2 minutes per question if paced evenly — more detail on using that pacing strategically follows later in this lesson.

No negative marking — always answer every question

The test does not use negative marking. An incorrect answer and a left-blank (unanswered) question are scored identically: both simply fail to earn credit for that question. There is no additional penalty subtracted for guessing wrong beyond the credit that question would have earned if answered correctly. This has one direct, important practical consequence: a candidate should never leave a question blank at the end of the 2-hour session, even a pure guess with no idea of the correct answer. A blind guess on a four-choice question has a mathematical chance of being right; leaving it blank guarantees it counts as wrong. If time is running short near the end of the session, mark an answer — any answer — on every remaining question before time expires.

Passing score: 70%, or 42 of 60 questions correct

The passing score for the Part 107 knowledge test is 70%. Out of 60 scored questions, that means answering at least 42 correctly. Put another way, a candidate can miss up to 18 of the 60 questions and still pass. This is a genuinely forgiving threshold compared to many licensing exams, and it is worth internalizing precisely because test anxiety often inflates the perceived bar — a candidate does not need to know every fact perfectly or answer every question with full confidence to pass; they need to be reliably correct on about seven out of every ten questions across the full test.

Worked example: converting a practice score to a real pass/fail read

Consider a candidate who takes one of this course's full-length practice exams (Lessons B and C of this module) and scores 46 out of 60. That is a 76.7% — comfortably above the 70% passing line, with room to spare for the normal variation between one 60-question set and another. Compare that to a candidate scoring exactly 42 out of 60 (70.0%) on a practice exam: that is a pass, but with zero margin — a slightly harder real-test question mix, or a handful of careless reading errors on test day, could tip that candidate below passing. The study-plan walkthrough later in this lesson uses exactly this kind of margin-of-safety thinking to decide when a candidate is genuinely ready to schedule the real test.

The FAA does not publish an official percentage breakdown by Area

The FAA's Airman Certification Standards (ACS) document for the sUAS rating (uas_acs.pdf) organizes everything tested into 5 Areas of Operation, each broken into Tasks, each Task broken further into individual Knowledge, Risk Management, and (where applicable) Skill elements. What the ACS does not do is state what percentage of the 60-question test comes from each Area. The FAA has never released an official weighting, and no legitimate source — including this course — can honestly claim to know the live test bank's exact per-Area distribution, since the bank itself is not public (see FAA-SOURCE-MATERIALS.md).

How this course estimates emphasis instead

Rather than guessing or repeating an unsourced number circulated by test-prep companies, this course builds its own estimate directly from the ACS document itself: by counting the actual number of Knowledge elements the FAA lists under each of the 5 Areas of Operation, then treating that count as a reasonable proxy for how much emphasis the real test is likely to place on that Area. This is grounded reasoning — the ACS is the FAA's own official blueprint for what is tested — but it is explicitly an estimate, not a leaked or confirmed FAA weighting. A real test could plausibly deviate from it in either direction on any given candidate's specific 60-question draw.

Counting knowledge elements across the full ACS document yields 141 total elements across all 5 Areas. Dividing each Area's element count by that total, then applying the result to a 60-question test, produces the approximate per-Area question counts shown in the reference table below. This is the exact same weighting this course's own full-length practice exams (Lessons B and C of this module) use to assemble their randomized 60-question sets from the full course question bank — so a candidate who takes those practice exams is training against this same estimated emphasis, not a random draw across all 17 modules with no regard for real-test proportions.

What this means for where to focus remaining study time

Under this estimate, Regulations (Area I) and Operations (Area V) together account for roughly 46 of the 60 questions — more than three-quarters of the entire test — while Loading and Performance (Area IV) is estimated at only about 1 of 60. That does not mean Module 6's loading and performance content can be skipped; every ACS element is still fair game, and a single missed easy question is still a missed question. But it does mean that, if study time is limited in the final days before a scheduled test, doubling back through Regulations content (Module 2's operating rules, plus Module 12 Remote ID, Module 13 Operations Over People, and Module 14 Night Operations, all of which fall under Area I) and Operations content (Modules 7 through 11: decision-making, physiology, airport operations and radio communications, maintenance, and emergency procedures, which make up Area V) is likely to move a borderline score more than an equivalent amount of time spent solely re-deriving density altitude calculations. Modules 15 and 16 (systems/technology and commercial operations) are supplemental background rather than a distinct ACS Area, so they carry no dedicated weighting in this estimate at all.

Pacing: roughly 2 minutes per question

With 60 scored questions and a 120-minute time limit, an evenly-paced candidate has an average of exactly 2 minutes per question. In practice, most questions on this exam — a straightforward regulatory recall question, a simple airspace floor/ceiling lookup, a definitional question — take well under a minute to read and answer confidently. That built-in slack is exactly what should be spent on the minority of questions that genuinely require more time: reading a sectional chart excerpt carefully, working through a load factor or crosswind component graph, or untangling a multi-part scenario question. A candidate who tracks roughly where they should be at the halfway mark (30 questions answered by the one-hour mark) has an early warning if they are falling behind pace, while there is still time to adjust.

Flag-and-skip, then return

The PSI test interface allows a candidate to mark or flag a question and move on, then return to it later before submitting the test. Use this deliberately: on a first pass through all 60 questions, answer everything that is clear immediately, and flag anything that requires real thought, second-guessing, or a chart/graph the candidate wants to come back to with a clearer head. This prevents a single difficult question early in the test from eating disproportionate time and creating pressure for the rest of the session. After completing a first pass through all 60, use whatever time remains to work carefully back through the flagged questions, now with the reassurance that every other question already has an answer recorded.

Process of elimination

Every question on this test has exactly four answer choices, and it is common for at least one or two of those choices to be clearly, confidently wrong even when the fully correct answer is not immediately obvious. Actively eliminating choices a candidate is certain are wrong — an old superseded rule, a threshold that belongs to a different category or a different unit (MSL where the question calls for AGL, or vice versa), an answer that contradicts a rule already confirmed elsewhere on the exam — narrows the field and meaningfully improves the odds of landing on the correct remaining choice, even under uncertainty. This is a more productive use of time than staring at all four choices as if they were equally plausible.

Watch for absolute qualifiers

Words like "always," "never," "only," and "must" inside an answer choice are worth reading carefully — aviation regulations are full of genuine exceptions, and an answer choice that states a rule in unconditionally absolute terms is frequently the wrong choice specifically because it ignores a real exception the correct choice accounts for. This is a pattern worth watching for on every question, not just a handful; it gets a full, dedicated treatment with worked examples in the next lesson in this module, Common Trick Questions and How to Avoid Them, so it is only introduced briefly here.