just ordered the mike holt master electrician exam prep package! I'm excited! scheduled to take the philadelphia license exam, anyone have any tips or advice on taking master exams. anyone that has taken philly's test??
I've taken many professional tests and they all are the same. You need to learn the language they speak and you need to know where to find content in the reference materials. You need to do it with confidence and in a timely fashion. Don't let that scare you. There's an easy way to do all that.
For every reference material (code book, etc.) read the scope, table of contents, skim through the index looking for unfamiliar terms, etc. Learn the layout. You're not going to remember tables & calculations but you do need to know where to find each table and how to do each calculation.
Practice questions - lots of them. The first time you do a set of practice questions you will bomb and this is fine; it's to be expected. Not that you're not a smart person; it's that you're a first timer at it. At least that's how it was for me. Use the answer key to figure out WHY you got the questions wrong. Then do some more practice questions. You're going to do much better the second time. Some time later after you have had plenty of distraction from what those first questions were even about, go back and redo those questions. Practice questions generally do a very good job of simulating the test questions, in fact, some of them may even be the exact question(s) you will get on your test.
Between now and test day all of your time should be spent learning that reference material and practicing test questions.
Even if you flunk it, that's not a problem. You can take it again of course. I only say this to calm some of the anxiety. It's only a test.
When you take the test, read the question. If you don't understand it, read it again. If you still don't understand it, skip it and make a note where it is. This way you don't burn up your time on one question when you could have had ten other questions done. They all carry the same weight no matter how hard they are. One thing to be careful of is if you skip a question, be careful not to put the answer for the subsequent question in the answer location for the skipped question. I did that once and it was a little stressful. I had to run back and re-enter answers and that took up some time.
Good luck!