No? Oh. Stop reading now then.
After being pretty bummed yesterday afternoon about the unfortunate change of plans, I decided yesterday night, right before I headed to bed, to download the material and test questions for the FEMA IS-1: Emergency Program Manager (list of FEMA courses can be found here.). I took that test this morning. Here’s how I did it:
- Google the question from the downloaded exam.
- See word-for-word question at Answers.com (or other similar places), and mark answer on printed exam.
- After marking all the questions on the printed exam, open online test.
- Wait for a couple minutes for “page to finish loading”(questions to appear).
- Realize page is done, and questions still aren’t there. Huh?
- Decide to mark answers according to printed exam anyway.
- Find SSN and put in all relevant info after finishing.
- Submit test, and anxiously wait to see what will happen next.
- Roughly 5 seconds later, receive an email announcing that the exam has been passed and to follow the link to see/print the certificate of completion.
- Try 3 times to open certificate before associating .asp to Adobe Reader under default programs.
- Try once again to open certificate and get pleasantly surprised that it actually worked.
- Be rather overly proud of self for being able to “associate” something to something else without having to 1) Google to figure it out or 2) call Daddy. 😉
- Laugh at description on certificate: “… has reaffirmed a dedication to serve in times of crisis through continued professional development and completion of the independent study course…”
- Finally print certificate and realize that’s 1 more credit for absolutely 0$ and very little time!
I attempted IS-3: Radiological Emergency Management next. That one is apparently not as popular with the general population since Google only revealed to me incorrect answers or stuff from the course itself. In the end I had to go through all the course work (interactive and online, so not boring PDF reading like the other one would have been) AND go through the test 4 times before I passed it. 😛 Thankfully there is no limit to how many times you can take these exams.
2 down, 22 more to go!
Oh, one little thing I almost forgot to mention: these are for college credit. Each FEMA is worth 1 credit, so even though I didn’t get to take the Middle East test, I almost made as many credits, and didn’t spend a dime on them! Another great thing is that for me, a soon-to-be TESC student, these FEMA credits are really free… as in, it doesn’t cost anything to have the transcripts sent to TESC. Yeah, sounds almost too good to be true to me too, but that’s how I understand it right now! I don’t know why any TESC student would fulfill their Free Electives requirements any other way. Just sayin’.