About MortuaryPrep
An independent study aid for the funeral service National Board Exam, built to be honest about what it is — including how the questions are made and what a practice score can and can't tell you.
Who's behind it
MortuaryPrep is built and run by Brian Thomas. It started from a simple observation: funeral service students preparing for the NBE were choosing between expensive courses, scraped flashcard decks of unknown accuracy, and apps that promise a “chance of passing” no one can actually calculate. The aim was a question bank that is accurate, explains itself, mirrors the real exam's format, and doesn't invent numbers.
It's a small, independent project, which means that when you email support, you reach the person who builds it: brian@mortuaryprep.com.
How the questions are made
The bank holds 900 original questions, split evenly between the Arts and Sciences sections and weighted to the official content outline. Here is exactly how each one gets there.
- Written from public sources only. Every question is written to the public NBE content outline and standard funeral-service textbooks. None are real exam items, recalled exam items, or copied from another company's bank.
- Drafted with AI assistance, under strict rules. Questions are drafted with the help of AI models against a written specification: one defensible answer only, no “all of the above” or “none of the above,” the correct answer isn't habitually the longest option, answer positions are randomized, and every item carries a chapter-level textbook citation.
- Answered blind by an independent reviewer. Each question is then answered by a separate reviewer that never sees the answer key. If the blind answer doesn't match the key, the question is fixed or thrown out — it doesn't ship on the drafter's word.
- Legal citations checked against the law itself. Every Legal & Regulatory and every Embalming question has had a second full review. Where that review suggested a change to a legal citation, the fix was checked against the primary source — the text of the Federal Trade Commission Funeral Rule (16 CFR Part 453) or the relevant statute — before it was applied. Reviewers are not always right, and one suggested correction turned out to be backwards; checking the source is what caught it.
- Explained, not just keyed. Every question explains why the right answer is right and why each wrong option is wrong, so a mistaken key is visible rather than silently memorized.
What hasn't happened yet
The bank has not yet been reviewed by a licensed funeral director or funeral-service educator. That review is planned, and this page will say so, by name, when it's done. Until then, if you think a question is wrong, please tell us — every report gets checked against the source.
What we won't claim
- No pass probabilities. Nobody selling NBE prep has the outcome data to tell you your chance of passing, so we don't show one. The readiness score is an estimate of how much of the blueprint you've mastered, labelled as such, and marked provisional until you've answered enough questions for it to mean something.
- No affiliation. MortuaryPrep is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to The International Conference of Funeral Service Examining Boards, the American Board of Funeral Service Education, or Pearson VUE.
- No invented statistics. When we publish numbers about the exam — like the pass rates in our NBE exam guide — they come from The Conference's own published data, with the working shown.
Found a problem?
Questions, corrections and complaints all go to brian@mortuaryprep.com. If you're comparing options, our side-by-side of NBE prep resources is written to be fair to the alternatives, and the free practice test lets you judge the questions for yourself without an account.