Stats – being updated

Bottom line up front

Public testing has been steady for six years: about 78 exams passed out of every 100. The headline number moves around mainly because of how many people sit a bonus second exam on the day, and because a handful of sessions are booked for a single closed group and behave nothing like the rest.

• Before COVID, most Denver sessions followed a cram class — but they were open to walk-ins, and the records name only the class, not which candidates came from it. For the 34 sessions at the Red Cross building and most other early Denver entries, class-taught and walk-in candidates cannot be told apart, so none of those pass rates says anything about either.
• Keep classes and student tests separate. Eight of the 354 sittings were run for a taught class or a closed unit — the CERT classes at Arvada, the military group at Fort Carson and a Scout troop in Denver — and five more were university student tests. They pass at 50% and 61%; the other 341 public sessions pass at 78%. Leaving them in costs 2026 seven points and 2021 five.
• Nine in ten people pass the exam they came for. 90% on a candidate’s first exam of the day. If they then sit a second exam the same afternoon, that one passes at 42%, and a third at 37%. This is the single biggest pattern in the data and it is the same every year.
• General is not the hard exam. Sat as the exam someone prepared for, General passes at 92% — higher than Technician. Its low overall figure is simply because most General attempts are bonus exams taken on the spot.
• The pass rate rose through the paper years, then settled. 53% in 2015 climbing to the high sixties by 2018, and between 68% and 79% every year since computer testing began. Within the six years of detailed records there is no real trend either way.
• In 2020 the team filed about one in fourteen of all the applications Laurel VEC handled, and roughly one in 120 filed anywhere in the United States. Its own volume rose 14% that year while Laurel’s fell by a quarter.
• Candidates travel much further than they used to. Before COVID, four in five came from within 25 miles and none from beyond a hundred; since, only half are within 25 miles and the average journey has risen from 19 to 31 miles.
• Nearly 2,500 license advances in eleven years. At least 1,787 people licensed for the first time and 695 moved up a class — an undercount, since the older log does not carry those counts for 2017 or 2018.
• Lapsed licensees are returning four times as often as before COVID. Candidates crediting elements from an expired license ran at 0.24 per 100 across 2015 to 2019 and 1.08 per 100 since 2020. All 21 in the detailed records left with a license, and none of them left as a Technician — fifteen as a General and six as an Amateur Extra.
• Twice as many people now leave with more than one element. Of everyone who passed something, 4.6% passed more than one element before COVID, 9.2% during it, and 8.0% since. Attempts per candidate did not change at all — people are passing more of the exams they already sat.
• COVID made people turn up. While rooms were capacity-capped, fewer than one booking in ten went unused — 9.2% — against roughly one in six since and nearly one in four before. Those who came also sat more exams: more candidates went from unlicensed to Amateur Extra in a single afternoon during those two years than in the five years before them combined, nine against two. A seat that is hard to get is a seat people use.
• The biggest loss is people who book and never come — one booking in seven. How far ahead they booked predicts it sharply: 6% of those booking three days out fail to appear, against 59% of those booking more than two months out. Bookings made over two weeks ahead are a third of the total but produce more than half of all no-shows, and they are the easiest group to send a reminder to.
• Returning candidates are a growing share of the work. One booking in nine came from someone who had tested before in 2021; by 2025 it was better than one in five. The count has held near 80 a year while first-time bookings fell from 441 to 268.
• People who have tested before do just as well — but turn up less. Their pass rate is the same as a first-timer’s, yet only 81% of their bookings become an exam against 87% for first-timers. Reminders will do most good with repeat bookers. Repeat and first-time can only be told apart from February 2021 onwards, when records of individual candidates begin.
• The second biggest is people who fail and never come back. Of those who did return and re-sit the exam they failed, 66 of 74 passed. But 1,596 of the 1,906 people on record since February 2021 appear once and never again.
• Computer testing opened the exam to candidates paper cannot reach. In October 2020 the team ran what is believed to be the country’s first Exam Tools session for a blind candidate, who sat the same exam as everyone else using their own screen reader. A paper exam offers no equivalent.
• The 2022 Technician question pool is easier than the one before it. Technician passed at 74% on the 2018 pool and 84% on the 2022 pool, a nine-point step that survives every control and appears at no other element. Since Technician is 60% of all exams, that single change accounts for much of the improvement after 2022.
• Computer grading coincided with a ten-point rise; computer testing with nothing. Pass rates ran at 55% across 2015 to 2017, jumped to 65% when grading moved to Exam Tools in March 2018, and did not move again when the testing itself went onto computers in May 2020 — 2020 came in at 63.9%. Whether the platform caused the earlier rise cannot be settled from annual totals.
• Paper never fully went away, and it makes no difference. Forty exams since February 2021 were sat on paper — 1.5%, including eight in 2026. Compared exam by exam with the computer ones sat alongside them, they pass at 90% against 80% on Technician, 25% against 66% on General, and 3 out of 3 on Extra. Three samples of 29, 8 and 3, pointing three different ways. There is no evidence that delivery method affects whether someone passes.
• The team has replaced one central test with a regional rota. Before COVID the Red Cross building in Denver hosted four sessions in every ten, and most other venues appeared once. Now six venues — Centennial, two in Denver, Elizabeth, Longmont and Greeley — carry four sittings in five, each running monthly. That is why journeys have lengthened: the team now draws from Weld and Elbert counties and the northern Front Range, not just the Denver metro.

What this report covers, and what the numbers mean. Detailed records start on 10 February 2021, when Exam Tools Tier 2 came online and began saving a record for every individual exam. That is not when the team started using computers — grading moved to Exam Tools in March 2018, and the team was approved for full use in February 2020.

Every section carries a band saying which years it covers and why. Some measures exist for all eleven years because they were recorded as session totals; others need a record of each individual candidate and therefore begin in February 2021. Where a section does both, the band says so and the text makes clear which figures come from where. Section 03 also shows older numbers from session summary sheets going back to the first session on 27 September 2015, which record session totals and nothing about individual candidates; they are a different kind of record and are shaded differently wherever they appear. 2026 covers January to July only.