Emergency medical technicians, or EMTs, are often the first health care providers at the scene of a medical emergency. There are multiple EMT skill levels, the highest being paramedic. Each classification denotes a certain skill set and level of training. In order to become a fully-certified paramedic, one must advance through four levels of expertise:

EMT-Basic

EMT-Intermediate/85

EMT-Intermediate/99

EMT-Paramedic

According to the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians (NREMT), EMT tests ensure that all emergency medical professionals are certified based on national standards of emergency health care. Each test has a computer-based portion and a practical portion to test both knowledge and the ability to perform the necessary task (instead of merely describing it).

Test requirements vary from state to state, but 46 states use one or more levels of the NREMT exams. All EMT tests have a computer-based portion and a practical portion. The computer-based tests contain questions on:

Patient Assessment

Cardiology

Trauma

Obstetrics

Pediatrics

Airway and Breathing Problems

Legal and Ethical Issues

EMS Operations

All questions, written by EMS professionals, are multiple-choice questions with four answer options. The test is computer-adaptive, which means that the program that generates the questions uses a sophisticated algorithm that tailors the questions to the test taker’s abilities in order to be sufficiently challenging.

Paramedic exam contains 80-150 questions and takes a maximum of two hours and 30 minutes

Paramedic exam may ask the test taker to identify which of the following is the name of a cranial hematoma that is above the dura: subdural, intracerebral, epidural or arachnoid."