Customer Reviews

Kaplan EMT Basic Exam

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Nobody will tell you that any NREMT test is easy. It is an amazingly confusing and difficult test, even at the EMT-B level. Having taken and passed the NREMT-B exam, and read the Kaplan book, I am not comfortable recommending this text as a preparatory book.

While the review sections cover much of the essential content and offer good advice, your best preparation is to follow your EMT-B textbook, review your notes, and understand that you will still be puzzled by the NREMT. The practice test Kaplan offers, though it captures the scenario-based style of the NREMT exam, is far too simplistic and far too easy. Finishing the 150 questions in Lapierre's book will take under an hour. The National Registry exam takes in excess of 1.5 hours for even the brightest students.

If you're hoping to cram or get a glimpse of the Real NREMT exam, this is not it. What makes the National Registry so difficult is the wording of their questions. You will be asked questions like, "What do you do first?" or "What is the minimum level of..." These types of questions require that you understand the precise order of actions, not just a broad overview of what to do.

The NREMT exam will test not only your knowledge, but you ability to recall very nuanced facts. The Kaplan book can help you understand where you might have weaknesses, but it is not at a level that compares to the National Registry exams.

I bought this book hoping to get a good idea of what the NREMT test would be like. After studying it for quite some time, I felt that I was in great shape for the test and had a good idea of what the test would be like. That was not the case.

The tests that are in this book are very straightforward and have relatively obvious answers. They also have several "All of the above" types of questions, none of which are found on the test. The practice test at the end of the book doesn't contain any questions that resemble the actual Registry test. There may have been a time where the test questions in the book matched the national registry, but that is not the case anymore.

It was not a total waste; there were chapter questions that did offer a different point of view than what I had picked up in my EMT class, but overall it was a waste of time; I think I would have been better to have stuck with studying the Brady book.

I've been working as an EMT for 5+ years now. I was able to answer the questions in the practice sets only because I knew the answers from work experience. But I was really frustrated with the wording of the questions. I would imagine that you could get pretty confused about the order of performing your ABCs after reading this book. The questions in this book aren't nearly as hard as the registry's bank of questions, but I would say the way they phrase the questions makes it twice as confusing. This book might be a nice reference to a student who is going through the EMT program, but not as a guide for the National Registry.

I used Kaplan's EMT-Basic Exam to prep for my test, and I know the great score I received is a direct result of having used this book to prepare. The practice sets and answer explanations were extremely helpful, as was the full-length test included in the book. I also found the subject reviews very helpful as a synopsis of what I needed to know before the test. I would recommend this book to anyone preparing for the EMT Basic exam.