The written exam and the skills evaluation

The candidate handbook is unambiguous: both parts of the examination must be passed. Passing one does not certify you, and the two are assessed in completely different ways.

The written examination is seventy multiple-choice questions on paper or screen. The skills evaluation is performed in front of an evaluator: you are given a set of skills to demonstrate on a person, and each one is marked satisfactory or unsatisfactory against a published checklist.

This site is the written half. It has original questions on all nine content areas, weighted the way the blueprint publishes them, and it exists to make the knowledge and judgment part unsurprising.

It will not prepare you for the skills evaluation, and no written material can. That is practised with your hands, ideally with somebody watching, against the checklist your own state publishes — which is the document to work from, because it is the one your evaluator will be holding.

The two halves are not unrelated. The details that make a skill satisfactory — washing your hands before recording a measurement, putting the call signal within reach before leaving, explaining the procedure before starting it, providing privacy — are the same details the written questions turn on.

That is a useful way to revise: for any skill you are practising with your hands, ask what the written question about it would be. It is almost always about the step that protects the client, and that step is almost always the one people leave out when they are rushing.