Journeymen exam prep

[djtazjr]

I will be taking the test soon and am wondering if this forum would help with not just answering or providing the proper answer but helping with understanding and reasoning.

I have posted on this forum before but with other issues.

My post will start tomorrow 10/12/04 and I would greatly appreciate the help with the forum.
This forum has helped in the past and I hope the same in the future.

 

[ryan_618]

Re: Journeymen exam prep

I think we will be happy to help you understand and help you learn how to use the code, but I also don't think anyone will give any answers (I hope not, anyway).

Fire away!...

 

[peter]

Re: Journeymen exam prep

[This is my personal experience in taking the California Journeyman's examination.]
The Experior building was rather brown and big – seven stories tall. I arrived a couple of hours early and went in to scope out the joint. It turned out they were only on the 4th floor. So I went up there and there was a small office with a black woman with long red fingernails. She was dealing with someone and ordered me to sit down. Eventually they finished and I asked if my calculator was legit. She said come back later so I sat in my car and almost finished a Wall Street Journal crossword puzzle.
A half hour before the exam – 11:30 – they have a choice of 8—12 or 12—4 – I went back. She looked at my new driver’s license and took my picture. My plain Casio scientific calculator was OK but programmable ones aren’t. She took all my pens and even my tape measure. Then she led me into the test chamber. It had obscure blue gray wall to wall carpet and a drop ceiling. In the middle there were 8 carousels. The chairs were comfortable, padded, swivel, rolling things bought from an office supply store. Vertical slats over the windows except for the window to the secretaries desk, a drop ceiling and the white walls complete the stage set with the addition of 4 little but obvious TV cameras.
Cindy handed me a dog-eared copy of the paperback 1999 Code and one sheet of purple paper with my name on it for scratching and an entire pencil.
So I sat down in front of the View Sonic computer TV set and the mouse and the keyboard by Compac. On the right of the screen was a strip about 2” wide but I didn’t have my tape measure. At the top was my famous mug. Then there was a space for five buttons: BACK, ENTER, MARK, SKIP and maybe “delete”. “MARK” would become very important. At the bottom was a little panel that showed the time remaining, the question number and the number of items marked. There was a short, un-timed tutorial and then the test would begin. I pressed start and
the test begins.
The first question was right out of Traister’s book – something about the minimum size of the hand hole in a light pole. So far so good so I clicked the right answer and clicked on the ENTER button. The next question asked how much space was required in front of a fire alarm panel fed by 120 volts. I leafed through the book but couldn’t find anything specific about that in the fire alarm article so I clicked 36” as a best guess and I clicked MARK and then I clicked enter. And so it went until I finished 50 of the questions – the halfway point – and then it gave me a 5 minute break. So I signed out at 12:50 or something and got I drink of water and visited the potty but I didn’t really need to. I wasn’t allowed to cheat or anything.
At 12:53 I was back and waited until the ordeal started again. By this point I was fairly confident. I answered a lot of them with minimal searching or just a best guess. If I didn’t feel like searching thru the book, I also marked the question to verify.later on the second go around. There were only two or three questions requiring calculation and the inverse function was helpful. There were no voltage drop or load calculations. After question #100 I was faced by 5 options: review all questions, review marked questions, return to a specific question, something else and the fatal DONE.
At that point, I had about 36 marked [as not totally verified] or unsure and about 2 hours left, so I selected review marked questions and was back at question #2. I spent more time on the fire alarm chapter but still couldn’t find anything but the index led to section 110 and I just settled for the usual 36” depth. A lot of the others, I looked up more specifically and nailed down most of those. So I would click on MARK again and it would cease to be marked. I went thru this process twice and went for a sip of liquid water and a couple of aspirins which cost me two minutes. Oh well.
Finally, I had narrowed the marked list down to about 6 questions. There was one question involving a 277 volt system of over 1200 amps but was connected to 900 volt fuses “phase to phase” and the problem was whether this should require ground fault protection. I found the Code entry and ended up guessing that it didn’t because of the fuses. This went around a few more times. Then I clicked the total review and my answers seemed reasonable so I went thru the final six zombies a couple of more times again and gave up and pressed DONE and exited the torture chamber.
Cindy had morphed into a white woman named Cora. She said it would take a couple of minutes for the computer to come to a conclusion as to my fate. She wouldn’t let me look at her computer screen. After nervously pacing up and down like an expectant father, she finally murmured “You passed”. She put a piece of paper into this machine and it eventually came out. I got 96.
~Peter

 

[capybara]

Peter's reply is over 2years old now but i wanna say:
THANK U PETER!!! I read your reply a million and one times b4 taking the test,
it really made me understand what to expect.

HE even mentioned the famous question about a 1200 A service disconnnect
with 900 A fuses, is ground fault protection required or not?
Yes, that question is still being used april 2007.

my only advice to others is:
1. dont worry, relax
2. this is open book test, so why worry?
3. if you've been in the industry for years, just practice using the nec, you dont have to memorize stuff.
4. this is a test of how well you can read the nec idex and lookup stuff.

5. i made the mistake of memorizing stuff, like
"where in the nec does it say feeder neutral cant be smaller than ground?
answer: 250.43 [or whatever]. "
or
"when are 2 doors required for an electric room?
answer: gear over 10' wide and over 4000 A [or something]"
this is a waste of time. dont bother memorizing.

DO have a general understanding of the trade, how to use the nec,
and be relaxed and confident.

Do read and re-read Peter's post. above. Thats exactly how it is.

 

[starbright28]

I will say that may work for the California exam, but it may not work for the rest of the 49 state's exam's. I know personally with MN that there is different paper variations of the test and many are administrated at one time. So far the past 2 times I took the test, the test was different each time, and each time that I thought I studied the correct stuff, it ended being some other stuff. Go figure.

 

[hockeyoligist2]

Peter, Sounds like you had a good environment to take your's! Mine was in a run down classroom, in a school that had been forgotten a long time ago. Half the lights working, about 50 people, half of them sneezing, the other half mumbling, no computer, a playground outside with what seemed like 500 screaming children!