Re: minnesota masters test
Actually, I believe the article said that only one person of 91 passed the new tests (journeyman and master), making the failure rate closer to 99%. I talked to Sue at the state board (she's in charge of exam administration), and she told me that the one passing score was on the journeyman exam, and he got a bare-minimum 70%. Clearly the new test was unfair, and there was enough anger from those who failed (Sue said it was *bad*) that the attorney general was contacted. He ruled that the unfairness of the new exam shouldn't be compounded by requiring those who failed to wait the six months for a retest, as required by state statute.
I spent the $450 for the MEA class before I took the test for the second time. I found it to be largely waste of time (and money!). The guy teaching the class was a former journeyman electrician (now an EIT) whose last experience with the exam was many years ago. I knew more about the exam than he did.
The exam prep course might be a good idea if you are taking the test cold without having done much of anything to prepare for it. Much of what the course covers is very basic stuff (e.g., Ohm's law), most of which doesn't show up on the exam. The course is not exam-specific, either. There were people there who were preparing for the journeyman and master.
Before I took the exam the first time, I spent many months going through everything in the Mike Holt book. I found it fairly helpful, but the test itself is not easy to prepare for unless you have specific information about it, mainly because of the memory (closed-book) questions. The 25 open-book questions really weren't too bad -- the calculations were uncomplicated, standard things involving voltage drop, wire ampacity, conduit fill, etc. If you can do the Mike Holt calculations, the exam ones will be a cakewalk.
What I found most difficult about the exam were the questions on the closed-book section that covered code trivia. There were a lot of them, and they were the kind of questions that were very easy if you happened to know the answer. They would also have been easy to answer with a code book. On some of them, I even knew exactly where the answer was in the codebook, but I didn't remember what the answer was. Examples: Busways must be supported every ________. How many #12 wires fit in a 4x4x1.5" box? I didn't happen to know those answers, as I have never worked with busways, and I don't use 4x4x1.5" boxes; I use big boxes whenever possible so I don't have to worry about box-fill calculations.
But because I didn't happen to know this kind of trivia, I had to wait six months for a retest.
Like Al said, though, it might be a good idea to take the course since they do have a free re-take policy, and the exam will almost certainly have been changed by the time a re-test would be taken. Also, I can say that there were several sample questions in the review course that were almost identical to actual questions I saw on the exam (I pointed them out to my classmates at the course). So if you do the course and try to remember the questions and answers, it should be somewhat helpful on the real exam, as you will likely see some of the same questions.
Yeah, $450 is a lot of money, but if it makes the difference between a passing and failing score, I think it would be well worth it. In retrospect, I know I would have passed the exam the second time around without having taken the MEA course, but I didn't know that at the time. It's probably more useful to someone taking the exam for the first time.