This firefighter exam cheat sheet compresses the NFSI's studyable cognitive skill areas into a fast, printable rundown of what departments actually test. It's a premium cheat sheet built by Capital Prep — the one premium prep we trust — and it's yours free. Pair it with the rest of your free firefighter toolkit: the practice test, study guide, and flashcards.
Firefighter Exam exam at a glance
- Test provider: Industrial/Organizational Solutions (IO Solutions) — NFSI
- Structure: 105 cognitive multiple-choice questions + 50 behavioral items = 155 total
- Time: About 2.5 hours (≈150 minutes), plus ~15 minutes of instructions
- Passing score: Pass/fail at the hiring agency's cutoff (commonly ~70%); passers ranked by score
- Cost & eligibility: Set by the hiring department; entry-level, no prior firefighting experience required
What’s on the Firefighter Exam cheat sheet
- Cognitive Ability (105 Qs, ~68% of items) — the studyable core — reading comprehension, verbal and language, mathematics, mechanical aptitude, spatial reasoning, situational judgment, and memory/observation.
- Behavioral Orientation (50 items, ~32%) — a five-point agree/disagree questionnaire on work-style traits — teamwork, stress tolerance, integrity — with no single keyed answer.
How to use it in your final week
- Front-load mechanical aptitude — it's the signature firefighter-exam skill. Drill the one rule everything hangs on: mechanical advantage = output force ÷ input force, and a machine always trades force for distance.
- Lock in the pulley and lever shortcuts: a pulley's advantage equals the rope segments supporting the load (fixed = 1, movable = 2), and effort × effort-arm = load × load-arm.
- Rehearse mental math with no calculator — memorize the fraction-to-percent conversions and practice percent-change (divide the change by the original) so setup is instant under time.
- Read the sheet the morning of the test as a final pass, and answer the behavioral items honestly and consistently rather than trying to guess the 'right' trait.
The cheat sheet is your review layer — your Firefighter Exam practice test drives the exam-readiness ring at the top of this page. Download it, review, then take a full practice exam (or drill with the study guide and flashcards) to see where you stand.
Firefighter Exam cheat sheet FAQ
Yes — you can download the firefighter exam cheat sheet as a PDF right now, with no account and no sign-up. It sits alongside Career Employer's free firefighter toolkit: the practice test, study guide, and flashcards.
It boils the cognitive skill areas down to a fast reference — reading comprehension, verbal, math and mental-math shortcuts, mechanical aptitude (pulleys, levers, gears, hydraulics), spatial reasoning, situational judgment, and how the behavioral orientation section works. It maps to the NFSI's two measures: a 105-question Cognitive Ability part and a 50-item Behavioral Orientation part.
Yes. Because there is no keyed right answer on the Behavioral Orientation measure, the sheet gives you the strategy instead — answer honestly and consistently across the five-point scale, since built-in consistency checks flag anyone trying to 'fake good.'
It centers on the NFSI (National Firefighter Selection Inventory) from IO Solutions, the version most departments use, but the reading, math, and mechanical cores also transfer to FireTEAM, FCTC, and civil-service exams. Always confirm which version your department administers.
Click the download button or the preview card at the top of this page to open the PDF instantly. Bookmark the page so you can pull it up again the morning of your test.
References
- 1.Industrial/Organizational Solutions (IO Solutions). “National Firefighter Selection Inventory (NFSI).” IOSolutions.com, 2026. ↑
- 2.Industrial/Organizational Solutions (IO Solutions). “Firefighter Test — Entry-Level Written Exam.” IOSolutions.com. ↑
- 3.Ergometrics. “FireTEAM Testing System.” Ergometrics & Applied Personnel Research. ↑
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