How Many Paramedic Students Fail Out Of Paramedic School?

Well, it’s hard to say exactly how many fail out overall.

Most courses require a 75% or better on every test to stay in the program. That’s not easy to do with how much you have to learn in a short period of time. Paramedic class is like cramming an associates degree into 10 months. No easy feat.

Here’s what we do know.

The NREMT has a measly 83% pass rate on the first attempt.

That mean 17% of students that make through the whole program won’t pass their registry on the first try. And that sucks because each attempt at the registry is $175. You don’t want to be wasting your time or your money when it comes to your certification.

The good news is you get three chances at passing, just like EMT.

And the overall pass rate after three attempts is way above 90%. Basically, that means if you can make it to the end of your paramedic class, you have a really good chance of getting your national certification.

The next question is, why do so many students fail the first go around?

Why They Fail

Most students fail because they have bad study habits.

It’s not their fault. Did you take a “how to study” course in high school? yeah, me either. You either figured it out or you didn’t.

And most people pretty successfully got through high school (or got their GED) not knowing how to study.

I didn’t realize how bad my study habits were until I went to college.

I’d never had to really study before. I found out my high school study were not up to par. So I had to teach myself how to take notes, how to read from textbooks, and how to actually study for exams.

For a lot of paramedic students, they have the same realization in paramedic class.

That’s a rough spot to be in. It leaves them floundering for the first few exams and by the time they figure it out, they’re falling behind. Medic class is not forgiving and will not slow down for you.

There are other reasons people fail, but this is the biggest one.

Some people refuse to make time to practice or learn their skills. Some people have family obligations that get in the way. But as long as you can get some good study habits down, you’re golden.

How To Not Fail

Don’t worry, there are some pretty easy ways to upgrade your study skills.

These work best if you have them before class starts, that way you never fall behind. But they work great even if you’re in the middle of the program.

• Read Before Class
• Take Practice Tests
• Advanced Study Techniques

Read Before Class

I bet you’ve been told to read before you come to class.

If you’re like me, you probably never did that a single time in you life. And it worked pretty well for you so far. However, there’s a good reason teachers tell you to read the book ahead of time.

Reading the book, even if you don’t fully understand, gives you a base to build the rest of the classroom knowledge on.

Quickly skimming the book the night before is all you need to do.

This isn’t a full, in-depth read through of the textbook. This is just a way for you to have a general idea of the material you’re about to learn in class. And do not worry about highlighting right now. If you start highlighting, everything will look important to you and you’ll just have 300 pages of highlighted text. Which is useless.

The only thing I really care about learning at this point is vocab and keywords.

They have a glossary in the textbook for a reason. It’s the most important words and terms the book thinks you need to know. That means it’s probably important for you to know for tests as well. So spend that first skim session reading through the glossary and finding those words in the text.

Legitimately this might take you 20 min. Don’t spend too long on it.

Take Practice Exams

Practice exams do a few things for you.

• Practice Answering NREMT Questions
• Tell You How You’re Doing

If you took the EMT National Registry Exam, you know the test has some really weird questions. In fact, it just changed so now the formatting is completely different. You can read up on those changes here.

To prepare for those weird questions, you should answer as many practice questions as you can.

Your textbook has a bunch of scenarios and practice questions that are definitely useful, but you don’t get as much feedback as you would from an actual practice test. There are some free quizzes you can take online; however they aren’t as complete as dedicated study apps.

The dedicated apps will give you the best feedback before the NREMT.

Your class can’t even give you as good a breakdown as the apps can. Certain ones like Pocket Prep give you access to thousands of questions and a full testing experience. You can take the test and it will tell you how likely you are to pass and what material you are the most behind on.

That way you don’t waste your time studying stuff you already know.

Advanced Study Techniques

Skimming your textbook for vocabulary words isn’t the only trick you can use to pass your paramedic class.

There are a ton of memory tactics, study guides, and test taking tips for students. And they’re really easy to learn. I won’t go into all of them here. This is just a quick jump-start into making class less scary.

If you want a full guide to some more advanced study tips, check out my article “Medic Class On Easy Mode.”

Good luck out there!