NBE practice test questions, by domain
Free practice questions for the National Board Examination in funeral service, organized the way the exam actually is — nine content domains across two sections, weighted to the official blueprint. Every question below is original, and every answer comes with a plain-English reason.
How the exam is built
The NBE is sat as two separate sections, Arts and Sciences. Each is 170 multiple-choice items in 170 minutes — 150 that count toward your score and 20 unscored pretest items mixed in that you cannot identify while sitting it. That works out to almost exactly a minute per question, which is the constraint most candidates underestimate.
The domains are not weighted evenly, and this is the single most useful thing to know before you build a study plan. Embalming alone is 62 of the 150 scored Sciences items. Funeral arranging and directing is 51 of the Arts items. Between them they account for more than a third of everything you will be asked across both sittings. Counseling, at 19 items, is worth roughly a third as much as embalming — study accordingly.
Sciences section
150 scored items drawn from 4 domains, weighted as below.
Embalming
The single heaviest domain on the NBE. 62 of the 150 scored Sciences items come from here.
Restorative Art
34 of the 150 scored Sciences items. Heavy on proportion, color theory, and wax technique.
Other Preparation of the Deceased
28 scored Sciences items covering everything around the embalming itself — PPE, prep-room sanitation, dressing, casketing, and shipping.
Funeral Service Sciences
26 scored Sciences items spanning anatomy, chemistry, microbiology, and pathology — the foundation the rest of the section is built on.
Arts section
150 scored items drawn from 5 domains, weighted as below.
Funeral Arranging & Directing
The heaviest Arts domain — 51 of the 150 scored items, more than a third of the section.
Legal & Regulatory Compliance
35 scored Arts items. The FTC Funeral Rule and the OSHA standards are the densest, most testable material on the exam.
Cemetery/Crematory/Other Dispositions
24 scored Arts items on cremation, interment, entombment, and the newer disposition methods.
Funeral Service Marketing/Merchandising
21 scored Arts items — casket construction, selection room method, and the pricing computations you will actually have to work.
Funeral Service Counseling
19 scored Arts items. Smallest domain on the exam, and the most theory-dense per item.
How to use these pages
Each domain page explains what the domain actually tests, lists the topics the items are drawn from, and shows real questions from the bank with the full reasoning for the right answer and each wrong one. They are meant to be worked, not skimmed: read the stem, commit to an answer, and only then open the explanation.
If you find yourself recognizing answers rather than reasoning to them, that is the signal to slow down. The NBE writes its distractors to catch exactly that — a plausible-sounding option that is a real practice borrowed from the wrong context. Being able to say why the other three are wrong is the difference between a bank you have memorized and material you actually know.
About these questions
Every item is original, written to the public content outlines and standard funeral-service textbooks, and blind-checked for one defensible answer with a real citation. None of them are real exam items, and none are copied from another company's bank. MortuaryPrep is an independent study aid and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to The Conference, ABFSE, or Pearson VUE.