Our Methodology
Every practice question and every state figure on this site was made a particular way, and you should be able to check it. This page explains both processes, including the parts we are not finished with.
1. Where the practice questions come from
Licensing exam items are confidential. Nobody may reproduce them, and any site claiming to show you real exam questions is either wrong or in breach. Our 1,500 questions are written from scratch to match the format, difficulty and topic weighting of the published content outline, which is a different and legitimate thing.
Every question carries a written explanation. That is not decoration: a question without one is a flashcard, and it teaches you the letter rather than the rule. Where a wrong answer is tempting for a specific reason, the explanation names that reason too.
2. How the topic weighting is set
The 11 content areas below and their exam percentages come from PSI's published national salesperson outline, cross-checked against three independent state bulletins. Practice counts are measured from our national question pool. They remain separate from the provider's exam percentages as we expand topic coverage.
Content area Share of exam Questions Contracts 19% 287 Agency 13% 194 Practice of real estate 12% 177 Property ownership 10% 150 Financing 10% 150 Valuation 8% 120 Property disclosures 7% 105 Real estate math (calculations) 7% 105 Transfer of title 6% 90 Land use controls 5% 75 Property management 3% 47 A caution worth stating: PSI and Pearson VUE publish different outlines with different numbers of content areas, and they are not interchangeable. PSI gives percentages across eleven areas, Pearson VUE gives item counts across eight. Averaging them would produce a table matching no real exam. We follow PSI and say so, rather than blending the two into something tidier.
3. Where the state exam figures come from
All 50 states carry figures read from official candidate handbooks, commission fee schedules and test provider pages, drawn from 50 separate documents. Every figure on a state page links to the document it came from, with the date we checked it. You should click those links rather than take our word for it.
When a field is not published, we leave it blank. Pass rates are the clearest example: only five states publish a first attempt rate, so the other forty five show nothing rather than an estimate. Retake waiting periods are similar. An empty cell is a true statement about what the state publishes; a plausible number is not.
We have written 305 notes flagging figures that are stale, contested, or contradict what the rest of the industry publishes. Several corrections came out of that work, including a state exam fee that most sites still list at an out of date figure and a pre-licensing hour requirement that changed in 2025. Those notes appear on the relevant state pages.
4. What the pass line meter can and cannot tell you
Where a state publishes a genuine passing percentage, we score your practice result against it. Where a state publishes a scaled score instead, we do not. A scaled score is not a percentage of questions answered correctly, so comparing a raw practice percentage to it would tell some candidates they had passed when they may not have.
Roughly half the states fall into that second group, along with a handful that publish no single figure at all because their two exam portions carry different cut scores. On those pages the meter is absent and the reason is stated. We would rather show you less than show you something confident and wrong.
5. How full practice tests are drawn and graded
Pages print a small set of explained sample questions, and these need no account. A full practice test is different: the questions are drawn from the bank on our server, your answers are sent there, and the server grades them and returns the explanations. That keeps the whole bank from being copied off a page.
Full tests are limited to protect the bank: one per rolling 7 days without an account, three per 7 days with a free account once the email is confirmed, and unlimited with a paid pass. The grading method is the same either way. See the pricing page for what each level covers.
6. The glossary
We have mapped 120 exam terms. A term earns a page only if it appears on state exam outlines or candidate handbooks, and only once we have questions that actually test it, because a definition with nothing to practise is a dictionary entry and you already have a dictionary.
Terms are released in waves rather than all at once. Publishing every entry immediately would bury the ones candidates actually look up.
7. What has not been independently reviewed yet
No licensed real estate professional has yet reviewed this material. The questions were written against published content outlines and the state figures were read from official documents, but neither has been checked by someone holding a licence. We are engaging a licensed reviewer, and this page will name them, their licence and the material they have signed off once that is real.
We are telling you this rather than staying quiet about it because you are about to spend money on an exam, and you are entitled to know what standard the free material you studied from was held to. If you find an error before our reviewer does, write to us and we will fix it and say so.
8. What we do not do
We do not reproduce real exam questions, buy question banks of unknown provenance, copy figures from other prep sites, generate state data from patterns rather than documents, or publish a number we cannot point at a source for. If a page cannot meet those conditions, it does not go up.
Question our method
Write to [email protected]. We read every message and reply to anything that identifies a factual error within two working days.
This page describes 5000 questions and 50 state records as of 2026-10-23. It is updated whenever the method changes, not only when the content does.