NBE Arts study guide
NBE Arts · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Arts section of the National Board Examination is the non-science half of the funeral service licensure testing sequence - the portion that asks whether a candidate can run a funeral home as a business, a legal entity, and a human encounter, rather than whether they can embalm or restore. It is aimed at candidates who have finished (or are finishing) an accredited funeral service education program and are moving toward state licensure, and at practitioners in states that accept board scores as part of their credentialing file. The NBE Arts study guide has 8 sections and about 3,220 words.
01Funeral Service Management
Management in a funeral firm is taught as four functions: planning (setting goals, forecasting case volume, budgeting), organizing (structure, job descriptions, delegation, chain of command, span of control), directing/leading (motivating, supervising, training, communicating), and controlling (measuring results against standards and correcting deviations). Expect questions that ask you to name the function being described .
292 words, about 1 min02Funeral Service Merchandising and Marketing
Merchandising covers selecting, displaying, pricing, and presenting goods: caskets, urns, outer burial containers, vaults, and ancillary items. Understand selection-room design (lighting, grouping by price, sight lines), the role of the general price list, and the separate casket price list and outer burial container price list required by the FTC Funeral Rule.
312 words, about 2 min03Funeral Service Law
Know the sources of law: constitutional, statutory, administrative (agency regulations), and case (common) law. Federal law and state law both apply; where a state rule is stricter than the federal rule, the stricter standard generally governs in practice.
292 words, about 1 min04Ethics in Funeral Service
Law sets the floor; ethics asks what a professional ought to do. Learn the major frameworks: deontology (duty and rules), utilitarianism (consequences and the greatest good), virtue ethics (character and habit), and the ethics of care (relationships and responsiveness).
292 words, about 1 min05Funeral Service Counseling and Psychology
Maslow (physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization); Freud (id, ego, superego, and defense mechanisms such as denial, rationalization, projection, displacement, repression, regression, and sublimation); Erikson (psychosocial stages); Rogers (person-centered: genuineness, unconditional positive regard, accurate empathy); and family systems (roles, boundaries, coalitions). The arrangement conference is a counseling opportunity, but the funeral director is not a psychotherapist.
271 words, about 1 min06Sociology of Funeral Service, Grief and Bereavement
Culture is the total learned way of life of a society; a subculture shares distinctive patterns within it. Norms are shared expectations, graded as folkways (customs with mild sanctions, such as appropriate dress at a visitation), mores (strong moral significance, such as protecting a body from desecration), and laws (codified norms backed by the state).
611 words, about 3 min07Communication and Interpersonal Skills
Sender → encoding → channel → decoding → receiver → feedback, with noise interfering at any point. Know the nonverbal channels: proxemics (space), kinesics (body movement), oculesics (eye contact), haptics (touch), paralanguage (tone, rate, volume), and chronemics (use of time).
272 words, about 1 min08Accounting, Business Mathematics, and Computer Applications
Accounting equation: Assets = Liabilities + Equity . Double-entry bookkeeping records at least two entries per transaction.
878 words, about 4 min