About First Attempt
Updated Nov 4, 2026
First Attempt helps people prepare for professional certification exams, free of charge. It has no accounts, no advertising and no tie to any exam owner. The name is a goal, not a guarantee: no study site can promise a pass.
Five pages for every exam
Each exam gets the same five pages, so you always know where an answer lives:
- Overview: what the credential is, who can sit, how renewal works, and a few sample questions.
- Practice test: a free question set; after you answer, every choice is explained, the wrong ones included. Example: the CEN practice test.
- Study guide: one section per blueprint area with its share of the exam, the mistakes that area tends to draw, and two or three sample questions.
- Exam facts: length, timing, pass mark, how results arrive and the retake rules, every row sourced.
- Registration and cost: how to book, where you can test, how long you have, and the fees the exam owner lists.
Fields covered so far
What the site does not do
- No recalled exam items. Questions are not lifted from real exam forms or rebuilt from what candidates remember seeing.
- No ads, affiliate links or sponsored pages. No exam owner, school or course seller pays to appear or to be ranked.
- No registrations or score lookups. Booking, results and credentials stay with the exam owner; contact lists who handles what.
- No full course. A study guide maps the blueprint and its traps; the owner's textbook or outline is still the reference you study from.
- No named experts. The site is published under its brand. Instead of bylines it publishes its method: the editorial policy and how questions are reviewed.
Independence
Exam names and credentials are their owners' property; we use them only so you know which test a page covers. When an owner's current handbook or web page disagrees with a table on this site, the owner is right. Each table shows the day it was checked, so you can see how old our reading is.