Who does the work
Content is written and reviewed by our editorial team, working to the standards set out across these policy pages. Review is done against the primary source material for the certification concerned, not against what the page said last time.
We also take applications from people who have worked in food service, alcohol service or training, because the hard part of writing a good question is knowing what goes wrong in practice rather than knowing the definition. If that is you, the contributor application asks about the background that decision actually turns on.
Editorial independence
The site earns money from paid practice tests, and where advertising appears it earns money from that too. Neither touches the content.
- Nothing here can be bought. No question can be written, altered, softened or removed because someone paid for it, and no answer key is influenced by a commercial arrangement.
- Advertising is separate from editorial work. Advertisers have no visibility of or involvement in what gets written. Holding any paid test removes advertising for you, so the incentive to fill pages with it does not reach the people who have bought something.
- We do not sell placement. Nobody can pay to be recommended, cited or linked to on this site.
- We are independent of ServSafe. No affiliation, no endorsement, no arrangement of any kind. That cuts both ways: nobody at the certification body reviews or approves anything here, which is why we point you to their material rather than asking you to take ours on trust. The full position is on our disclaimer page.
Free and paid are held to one standard
Free tests and paid tests draw on the same question bank, follow the same blueprint rules and pass the same approval step. The difference is length and coverage, not care.
This is deliberate and it costs us something. The obvious commercial move is to make free material just weak enough that paying looks necessary. It also means the people who cannot afford to pay get the worst preparation, which is the opposite of why a free practice test should exist. If our free tests are good enough to be useful on their own, that is the intended outcome rather than an oversight.
What we will not publish
Some of this repeats what is on other pages. It belongs here too, because a process is defined as much by its refusals as by its steps.
- Live exam content. We have no access to it, would not use it, and no independent site has it. Anyone selling you real exam questions is selling something invented or stolen.
- Questions copied from other prep sites. That is how one error becomes a hundred, with nobody able to trace where it started.
- A question we cannot source. If the team cannot point to the material an answer rests on, the question does not go out, however reasonable it sounds.
- Guidance on what your jurisdiction requires. That is set by your health department and employer and it changes. We will tell you what an exam tests; we will not tell you which certificate you need.
How the policies fit together
Four pages, four stages. This page is the map; each of those is the detail.
- How We Create Practice Questions covers writing: blueprints, distractors, explanations, tagging.
- Sources and References covers where facts come from, which source wins when two disagree, and what we refuse to source from.
- Review Policy covers how often published content is rechecked, what triggers an early review, and what a review date means.
- Corrections Policy covers what happens once something is found to be wrong.
Where this process falls short
Stated because a process page listing only strengths is marketing with subheadings.
- A reviewer reading their own work reads it the same way twice. Scheduled review is good at catching drift and much weaker at catching a question that was wrong the day it was written. Reader reports are what catch those, which is why they go to the front of the queue.
- Local rules are the hardest thing here to keep current. Thousands of jurisdictions, none of which tell us when they change something.
- Between reviews, content can be out of date. The review date on a page is what tells you how large that window might be.
Holding us to it
A published process only means something if someone can check it. If a question is wrong, an explanation does not explain, or this page describes something we are visibly not doing, report it.
The correction form takes a minute and asks for the track, the test and the question number, which is everything needed to check a claim. Reports naming a source get looked at first.