EMT PASS (new‪)‬ 17+

This app was good, not great, in preparing me for my NREMT.
I ultimately passed in my first attempt, but I attribute that more to my education than this app.
I wanted to love the app. I spent a lot of time and money using EMT Prep in advance of the NREMT, but ultimately, I don’t think it was worth the cost.

PROS
-Helped prepare me for the types of questions and format/style of the exam.
-Reminded me about some content I hadn’t thought or remembered to review.

CONS
-I found many questions either directly conflicted with what I’d been taught in school, or even with other questions asked within the app.
-No way to get clarification when answers between 2 questions conflicted. Explanations are always given for answers, but no way to compare them if they conflict.
-Absolutely shook my confidence in what I thought I knew.

Overall, I was much more prepared than I thought when I purchased this app. The app led me to believe I didn’t know anything and would fail the NREMT. I somewhat panicked the morning of even though I KNEW MY STUFF. I don’t think the app gave me a fair assessment of what I knew, and I totally disagree that it is updated every year. Some of the content was definitely out of date!

I can tell you that I’m a pretty good test taker and know how to get top scores. The most important thing is to have a deep understanding of the concepts like the whys and hows. This app does have a few good questions that force you to think about the different processes of the underlying condition but a lot of the explanations are inadequate in that regard and just say things like “this question is really hard, you’d pass if you got this one right”. The explanations also sometimes are entirely mismatched with the question. For example, one question explained that loss of potassium pump was the main cause of cell death but the question was asking what was the main cause of hypoxia.

If you really want to do well and know the content well, study pathophysiology. It’s really easy to remember what the symptoms are for a given medical condition if you understand how it works. If you know what the main benefit or action of the different treatments it’s pretty easy to figure out when and why you need to use certain treatments in certain cases. Yes, there is some brute memorization still like for dosage, but this way it’s fairly minimal.

I was one of the misfortunate few that received a failure email after my NREMT, which really really sucked, but I decided to look at it as a detour, not a final destination. I studied A LOT before my NREMT, and did well during my entire course, but I was totally caught off guard by the NREMT question vocabulary and style, and even though I was a whisper away from passing it, close enough doesn’t count.

After the test I had a lot of difficulty finding material that felt like the NREMT style, and so far this was the closest thing I’ve found. It feels almost exact really, and I feel it describes the NREMT mindset really well. Apps like EMT Prep are great if you struggle with the concepts, but that app didn’t feel like it did anything to prepare me for how the NREMT was going to be. I’m not to the finish line yet, but this app sure has helped me feel a lot more confident again. I’m thankful for that.