Editorial policy: how a figure gets onto a page

Only documents issued by the organization that runs the exam or delivers it:

• candidate handbooks and guides, such as HPCC's December 2025 handbooks for the RN and advanced practice exams or IC&RC's General Candidate Guide updated April 1, 2025;
• content outlines and blueprints, including outlines posted for a future edition;
• credential, fee, recertification and statistics pages on the organization's website;
• booking pages of the test vendor, for example PSI's list of HPCC exams open for registration;
• for the IC&RC ADC exam, the fee and credential pages of six boards that use it: the member boards for Florida, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and Maine's state board.

Prep courses, forums, social media and other study sites are never a source, even when they quote a figure correctly.

Each source line carries a reading date: the day we last opened the document and compared it with the page, not the day the body issued it. Every figure at launch was read on November 11, 2026, so a handbook dated December 2025 shows both, the edition in the source line and our reading in the date.

We show the figure from the body's live web page and record the other document's figure in the table's note. The non-member fee for the RN hospice exam is the case at launch: the HPCC credential page and the December 2025 handbook give different non-member prices, and the table follows the page. The table marks the price as the credential page's, and the registration page asks you to check the amount when you pay.

Where a body publishes nothing at all, the gap stays visible. IC&RC sets no exam fee of its own, so the IC&RC ADC registration page lists what each board we checked charges.

A change counts once it is in force. The 2027 hospice nursing outlines are the launch case: posted, undated, so the study guides keep today's outline and show the posted one beside it. We do not guess a start date.

Short-lived dates get the same caution. HPCC tests in set windows through the year. Each window has its own application deadline, so the pages explain how the windows run instead of naming the next deadline, which can pass between two readings of the source.

Then the page says which board decides and counts what we found. For the addiction counselor exam the board grants the title, and the fee table lists each posted fee with its board, along with the boards that publish none. A sentence such as "most boards" appears only when the table behind it shows the count.

When a re-read shows that a figure has changed at the source, the table row, every sentence that relies on it and the checked date change together, so the date never vouches for an old number. A practice question found to have a wrong key or a second defensible answer is withdrawn and re-enters the review steps from the start; it comes back only after passing them, or a replacement takes its place.

No reader inbox exists (the contact page explains why), so corrections come from our own re-reading of the source documents.