Best free resources for BMS prep in 2026 — compiled list

The official candidate guide is something a lot of people skip but it literally tells you the topic weighting and domain breakdown. It's the roadmap for your study plan. Never skip it.

For BMS - Bachelor of Mortuary Science specifically, I found the PracticeTestGeeks explanations were detailed enough that I didn't need to buy a separate study guide. The combination of doing the practice questions + reading every explanation (for both right and wrong answers) covered most of the content I needed.

Great list. I'd add: LinkedIn Learning has some funeral services-related courses that overlap with cert content, and if you have a library card many libraries give free access to it. Also check if your local library has access to O'Reilly or similar — tons of technical content there.

So I failed my BMS the first time and honestly it was because I just read through the textbook over and over and never actually tested myself. Big mistake. Second time around I flipped my whole approach and did practice questions first, then went back to the book only for the stuff I got wrong. The PTG questions on here were huge for that, and I basically lived in this bms practice test pdf on my commute so I wasn't wasting time. Embalming theory and the legal/ethics sections were where I kept slipping, so I drilled those until they stopped scaring me.

The other thing that changed everything was timing myself. First attempt I ran out of time and panicked on the last section. Don't do that. Once I started doing full timed runs it didn't feel like such a wall on test day. If you've already failed once, don't beat yourself up about it, just figure out which two or three topics are actually dragging you down and hammer those instead of trying to relearn the entire thing.

Failed my BMS the first time around and honestly it was because I leaned way too hard on just reading the textbook and watching videos. Felt like I knew the material but the actual exam asks things in ways you don't expect, especially the embalming chemistry and the legal/ethics stuff. Second time I switched to drilling questions every single day instead, and the thing that helped most was working through this bms practice test pdf so I could do it offline on my breaks at work.

The big difference was I stopped just checking if I got it right. I'd read the explanation even when I guessed correctly, because half the time my reasoning was wrong and I just got lucky. Do that and you'll start seeing the patterns in how they word things. Passed comfortably the second attempt, and it wasn't because I was smarter, I just practiced the way the test actually works.