How exam facts are sourced and dated

Only the body that owns an exam, or the vendor that delivers it, counts as a source. At launch the list is:

• NCC: the 2026 candidate guides for inpatient obstetric and neonatal intensive care nursing, the 2026 registration and maintenance catalogs, and the Guide to Testing Methods, which covers PSI test centers and remote proctoring. The archived 2025 guides, in Internet Archive copies, serve for comparison.
• DANB: the candidate handbook, the outline of each component exam, the 2026 application packets, the recertification rules, DANB's state-by-state requirement pages, its blog posts on scoring and its State of the States newsletter.
• BCSP: the CHST page, the Credentials At-A-Glance sheet, the CHST5 blueprint, the recertification pages, BCSP's annual report, and its 2018 CHST guide in the copy hosted by ASSP.

Numbers circulating on prep vendors' blogs, forums or rival study sites are ignored, including the ones that match.

Each figure is kept as one entry per exam, holding three things: the value, the title of its source and our last reading date. An exam's pages do not keep their own copies; they pull from that entry, so the overview and the registration page of one exam cannot print two prices for it. In the fact tables, each row shows its source and that date.

Prices are undiscounted, in US dollars. NCC and DANB publish fee schedules labeled by year, and the amounts here come from their 2026 documents; once a 2027 schedule appears, check it before paying. BCSP adjusts prices on no fixed calendar; its fee rows say so.

BCSP's current CHST material gives the exam time, 4 h, but not the length, so the question count printed here is taken from BCSP's 2018 guide and labeled with that source wherever it appears. The answer format and the share of unscored questions carry the same label.

Silence in a source shows up as silence in the table, never as a number imported from elsewhere. The RHS retake row, for example, says that no waiting period is stated, because DANB's handbook gives none.

No pass mark is printed here unless its owner prints one first. BCSP keeps the construction exam's cut unpublished, and the table says exactly that. NCC has no fixed percentage for either core nursing exam, and its report gives pass or fail plus a word rating per content area. DANB's threshold is 400 on its 100–900 scale; that number is converted, and it is not a percentage correct. Cut scores that circulate online for these exams are left out.

DANB's state pages show which of its exams each state's rules mention. A listing is not a requirement: whether an exam is mandatory, one of several routes or optional is decided by each state dental board. The state table on the dental assisting page cites DANB's page for every row and names the board that has the final word. A few rows add a dated rule change; New Mexico's, for instance, notes a 2026 rule that put a board-approved course route beside the RHS exam.

A wrong figure is corrected once, in its entry; every page that displays it changes together, and its reading date is updated. A flawed practice item is pulled from its page, then mended or swapped, and the replacement repeats the complete question review before going back up.

These pages earn nothing from ads, sponsors or affiliate links, and they sell nothing. NCC, DANB, BCSP, PSI and Pearson VUE get no preview of any page and no voice in its content. Their names, and the names of their exams, appear purely so a reader knows which credential is meant.