Just this week in my study class I had a guy who passed his journeyman electrician exam.
When I asked him the difference between the day he passed and the day he failed I got a great story out of him.
About 12 days ago a man is cramming the night before a major exam. He is stressing a little and not going to get a very good night sleep. He wakes up in the morning rushing to get out of the house with all his testing material. Locating exactly where the testing facility proves to be difficult. You see in this area the Pearson Vue is on the third floor of an office building right in the middle of downtown. Even when you get inside the building you have to read the signs to find out what floor.
Okay so after circling the block a few times he finds a parking garage and goes in to park. The problem is that this is a metered parking lot so you must go to the kiosk to get your ticket. By this time he is starting to run a bit later than he expected. He goes to the kiosk and slides his credit card in and it does not read it. He doesn't have any change on him so he goes to another kiosk, again no luck so basically he left his car parked in the garage expecting to get a ticket when he returns.
He finally gets into the building and find Pearson Vue. The man is stressed out and since he is running late he goes right in and starts the computer and the questions are coming, and they are hard, and he is gripping, his mind is already mush and he's only an hour into what turns out to be a grueling 4 hours with 15 questions marked for review that he is struggling to get answered, guessing, down to the last second.
Well guess what? He failed. but not to bad he got a 64 and needed a 70.
Now, fast forward 6 days he comes to his first class. I ask him when he plans to test again and he says asap. Ok great. That will prove to be 6 days from now. We start by answering the questions he got wrong on the exam. They don't give you the questions you got wrong but what I mean is we went over questions and I made sure he was doing things the right way.
It turns out my man was having trouble with some series circuit General knowledge questions, how to properly use table 310.15(B)(16), transposing the voltage drop formula, and where to find the motor calculations.
Honestly, everyone has these same issues but none the less his electrician exam was in NH and this is like 75% of that test.
So here is what we did. I emailed him a copy of the Electrical Exam Academy Study Guide and just told him to go through the table of contents and click and read the chapters he had trouble with. Then in class we ironed out all the formulas and calculations which are not bad if some tells you exactly how to do um. He took the quizzes from the study guide and learned how to use the code book's index. This was all done in three 3 hour classes.
He was able to get a seat at the testing facility that Thursday morning because someone cancelled. Honestly I thought he could have used one more class but Pearson Vue is very busy and hard to get seats. They said they were booked out a month. The last thing we talked about was easy questions.
We talked about missing easy questions because even when he was preparing for the exam he was rushing and missing gimme exam prep questions. I told him that you can't rush the study or the quizzes this is what your trying to learn. On this exam the easy questions are to important.
It is okay to hurry on the exam but you cant rush past the questions. You have time to read each question 3-4 times if you have to. If you rush past the easy questions and get them wrong you are going fail.
So now the night before the exam. He is confident about the exam location, he is prepared with the meter change, and laid out everything he needs for the morning commute. He is still stressed out but more prepared to answer questions plus he has seen the exam so he knows what to expect.
Exam day.
He is much less stressed. He arrives at the facility early enough to use the bathroom. When he sat down to the computer he takes a deep breath. His agenda was to answer each question straight through. He muscled through the calculations, had the general knowledge locked, crushed the special occupancy that he was working on from the study guide, used the index like a pro and found tough questions and word for word answers from articles.
No shit 2 1/2 hours later he was done 105 questions with 10 very hard to find questions marked for review. He spent another hour finding those answers and had his license with 30 min to spare.
