Shortcut or Short Circuit?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

A student in paramedic school is a really, *really* good EMT. Everyone wants to work with them, they have great empathy and technical skills, and can even anticipate what their partner needs. They blow through scenarios in lab, and get great preceptor feedback.

They get through paramedic school with great grades, They spend hours going over practice questions from (insert your favorite online test bank), and they pass the final.

And then they bomb the National Registry. Again and again.

Unfortunately, that great EMT – the one who can rock a scenario and blend in so well on clinicals that patients don’t even know they’re a student – can’t actually pass the credentialing exam and become a paramedic.

What gives?

This is a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the National Registry exam. But in 2026, the story has a challenging new chapter courtesy of Generative Artificial Intelligence. Students can now get answers to complex writing prompts in a matter of seconds.

For perspective: as recently as 2023, SOE issued homework assignments with heavy focuses on research and writing. One such assignment was to research multiple sclerosis, and answer several questions pertaining to it. MS is a rare disease, and one that doesn’t typically generate daily 911 calls – so why was it chosen as a homework topic in the neurology chapter instead of a more common EMS call such a stroke or seizure?

The answer is pathophysiology. Researching MS provided students with a comprehensive tour of the nervous system. Students were asked to learn about myelin sheathes, propagation of nerve impulses, and how autoimmune diseases affect mobility, pain management, mental health, and more.

This assignment often took a few hours of reading and high-level mental synthesis. Today, a student can copy and paste the assignment into their AI model of choice from their phone, and get a ready-to-submit essay in seconds.

The time saved feels awesome, but the destination was never really the point. It was always about the journey. Consequently, we have seen more students who fail exams admit to using AI during their remediation and debriefing. AI is a powerful tool, no doubt, but its real power lies in the ability to do mundane, repetitive tasks.

Unfortunately, very little of paramedic school is mundane and/or repetitive. True, it may FEEL that way to the student who is in the middle of it, especially with clinical rotations and their regular job competing for time and brainpower. But paramedic school (and any medical science) is continuously built upon the previous lesson.

It’s exactly like the old saying “You can’t know bad lung sounds until you know what good breaths sound like” that preceptors use to convince students to actually use their stethoscope.

“Professor, you’re just stuck in the past!” Students may protest, “Isn’t this just the same thing as when Google came out, and students no longer had to use the card catalog at the library?”

The short answer is no. Search engines really are a big time-saver. The actual reading, processing, and thinking is still being done by the student. Generative AI does the thinking for them. It hands over a pre-chewed conclusion, robbing the student's brain of the struggle required to build the physiological “scaffolding” required for higher-level medical science.

The NREMT has a large focus, rightly so, on pathophysiology and adaptive clinical judgement. Bypassing homework with the heavy use of AI means short-circuiting the mental muscles needed to pass the exam.

AI has forced us to revisit how we take students on that journey to build their knowledge. At SOE, we are constantly adapting our curriculum, tracking remediation trends, and ensuring that our assessments challenge true clinical reasoning rather than copy-and-paste capabilities.

We owe it to our students to help them pass, but more importantly, we owe it to your operations and your communities to ensure that our graduates didn’t shortcut OR short-circuit their learning process.