CART provider exam — what accuracy threshold do I actually need to hit?
Working toward my CART provider certification and trying to nail down exactly what accuracy rate I need to demonstrate on the skills portion. I've seen different numbers in different places — 96%, 98%, some sources say it varies by setting. My realtime is consistently hitting about 97.5% on practice files and I'm trying to decide if I'm ready to sit or should push that number higher first.
I've been a certified court reporter for 8 years but only started doing CART work about 2 years ago. The vocabulary demands are really different — especially in educational settings where you get technical terminology across every subject. My medical and legal vocab is strong from court work but I get tripped up on STEM content and proper nouns in academic contexts.
The other thing I'm fuzzy on is what the evaluation scenario looks like. Is it a live speaker test, audio files, or a mix? And how long is the test content — 5 minutes of material or closer to 30? Understanding the format would help me calibrate my prep better.
The accuracy threshold I've always seen referenced is 98% for CART work. At 97.5% you're close but I'd push that higher before sitting. The difference between 97.5% and 98% sounds small but on a 10-minute test it's only a few extra errors and those can push you below threshold.
Your STEM vocabulary gap is worth addressing specifically. I started building custom dictionaries for math, chemistry, and biology terminology about 6 months before I tested. Running audio files from online university lectures is a good way to encounter that content in realistic conditions.
The format I experienced was audio-based, not live, which is actually harder in some ways because you can't adapt your steno to a speaker's rhythm the same way.
Eight years of court reporting experience will serve you well. The discipline and accuracy habits from court work translate directly. CART is more demanding on vocabulary breadth but the technical steno skills you already have are the harder thing to develop from scratch.
Make sure your realtime software is set up exactly how you'll use it in testing conditions — same dictionary, same settings. I lost points on mine because I was used to having certain conflict resolution settings active that weren't available in the test environment. Know your baseline setup cold.
Just passed mine last month so this is fresh. The 98% threshold is what you'll need for the federal/legal settings certification, and honestly, 97.5% in practice doesn't always translate cleanly to the actual skills test because the stress alone can knock you down half a percent. The one thing that made the difference for me wasn't drilling accuracy on clean audio — it was practicing with crappy source material, speakers who mumble, background noise, that kind of thing. When you can hit 98% on bad audio, clean audio feels easy.
Also don't sleep on your dictionary prep. I wasn't expecting how much a solid steno dictionary would carry me, especially on proper nouns and technical terms that show up without warning. If you're consistently at 97.5% you're close, but spend the last few weeks stress-testing yourself with challenging conditions rather than just logging more clean hours. That's what pushed me over.
So I went through this same confusion a few months back. The short answer is 98% for most CART settings, but here's the thing that actually helped me stop obsessing over the threshold and start improving: I quit just marking wrong answers as wrong and started asking why they were wrong. Was it a brief conflict I hadn't trained? A homophone I was autocorrecting in my head before it even hit my fingers? That diagnostic shift made way more difference than drilling another 500 takes.
At 97.5% you're honestly close, and you probably already know that. But the gap between 97.5% and 98% is almost always hiding in patterns, not random misstrokes. I kept a little error log for two weeks and realized like 60% of my errors were the same ten briefs I'd never properly disambiguated. Fixed those, cleared the threshold. It's tedious but understanding the why is what actually sticks when you're in a live CART session and there's no second take.