How the exam facts on this site are sourced

A figure goes into a table only after we have read it in a document published by the body that owns the rule. For Firefighter I those are:

• State rules: the Texas Administrative Code (title 37, chapter 439), the Florida Administrative Code (chapter 69A-37) and the Ohio Administrative Code (rule 4765-20-06).
• State handbooks and manuals: the TCFP curriculum manual and academy examination procedures, the CAL FIRE State Fire Training exam overview and implementation plan, and the Pennsylvania OSFC candidate handbook.
• Agency pages: certification pages of the Florida Bureau of Fire Standards and Training, the North Carolina Office of State Fire Marshal, New York's Office of Fire Prevention and Control and the Virginia Department of Fire Programs.
• The standard: NFPA's published summary of what changed between NFPA 1001 and NFPA 1010, plus a state academy's gap analysis of the two editions.

For the EMS rows the documents are the National Registry's candidate handbooks and examination pages, and the International Board of Specialty Certification's candidate handbooks and fee page. Third-party prep sites, forums and flash-card sets are never used as a source, even when they repeat a number we later confirm.

Firefighter I is certified by states, so most of its rules are true in one state and false in the next. A retake limit, a skills format or a prerequisite is always printed with the state it belongs to. When a figure is the same across the states we checked, the table says which states those were, and the wording stays at "in the states we checked" rather than "everywhere".

Each row also shows the date we read the source. Where an agency has already announced a change, such as a state moving its exam to NFPA 1010 on a set day, the date of the change is written into the fact so the sentence stays correct after that day arrives. Rows we could not confirm in a primary document are marked as unconfirmed rather than left to look settled.

• Pass rates. None of the state agencies we checked publishes Firefighter I pass rates, and none appears here.
• Topic weights. No state breaks its written exam down by topic. The Firefighter I topic list shows Texas course hours as course time, and never as a percentage of the exam.
• Hiring-test figures. Entrance tests such as FireTEAM, NFST and CPAT are named so readers can tell them apart from certification, but we have not verified their formats and give no numbers for them.
• Unverified renewal rules. We found no primary document for Firefighter I renewal in the states we checked, so the tables carry none.

NFPA standards and the two textbooks the Texas, California and Pennsylvania banks follow, IFSTA's Essentials of Fire Fighting and Jones & Bartlett's Fundamentals of Firefighter Skills, are copyrighted. We name them so you can find the edition your academy teaches, and we describe the job performance requirements in our own words with their section numbers. We do not reproduce chapters, skill sheets or text from those books.

Each practice question belongs to one topic page and one area of NFPA 1010 chapter 6. Every answer option, right or wrong, carries a short reason, so a miss shows which idea got mixed up. Before a question goes live it is checked for a single defensible key, for a match with the current edition of the standard, and against the other questions on the site so the same idea is not asked twice. They are study items for practice, not a preview of any state's question bank.

Fire & EMS Certification Exam has no tie to NFPA, IFSAC, the Pro Board, IFSTA, Jones & Bartlett Learning, the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians, IBSC, or any state fire training agency or fire department. Those names identify the exam or standard a page is about, nothing more.

The one commercial element is a set of buttons that open phone study apps for the same exams. The tables, topic pages and practice questions are open to everyone without an account, and the buttons have no say in what a table reports. What happens when you tap one is described on the privacy page; how to raise a doubt about a figure is on Contact.