Practice exam review and test-day strategy

Twelve weeks after his approval letter arrived, Darnell sat at the conference table at Calloway Electric on a Saturday morning with his reference books stacked beside him, a calculator, a timer and a practice set of eighty questions. Ruth had insisted he take one full four-hour practice session under exam conditions before the real thing. After three months of study, she told him, it was time to find out what four hours with those books actually felt like. This lesson pulls the course together: a study plan, a review of the topics most likely to appear, worked practice questions from both the technical and the business sections, and a plan for exam day.

A twelve-week plan

Most candidates who pass the Georgia exam on the first try follow some version of the same plan. They spend the first weeks getting to know the references and tabbing them, the middle weeks working through the technical content and calculations, a dedicated block on business and law, and the last weeks on timed practice and weak areas. Darnell's plan, built with Ruth, devoted more time to the code and calculations than to anything else, but he protected two full weeks for the business guide, Circular E and Part 1926, because thirty questions come from them and they are the area where experienced electricians most often lose points.

Technical review: the calculations that keep coming back

Across the technical areas of the outline, the same few calculations appear again and again: Ohm's law and power, single-phase and three-phase current, voltage drop, conductor sizing with correction and adjustment, motor branch-circuit sizing, transformer current and protection, box and conduit fill, and dwelling and commercial load calculations. The master electrician core courses covered each one in detail. In the last weeks, the goal is speed and accuracy: knowing which formula applies, which table or article to open, and how to check an answer for reasonableness before moving on.

# Quick practice: transformer and three-phase current (illustrative values)
import math
kva = 75
for volts in (208, 480):
    amps = kva * 1000 / (math.sqrt(3) * volts)
    print(f"{kva} kVA at {volts} V three-phase: {amps:.1f} A")

# Single-phase current and voltage drop (illustrative: 2-wire, K = 12.9 for copper)
load_amps, length_ft, cmil, volts = 40, 150, 10380, 240
vd = 2 * 12.9 * load_amps * length_ft / cmil
print(f"Voltage drop: {vd:.1f} V, or {vd / volts * 100:.1f} in every 100 volts")

75 kVA at 208 V three-phase: 208.2 A
75 kVA at 480 V three-phase: 90.2 A
Voltage drop: 14.9 V, or 6.2 in every 100 volts

The first result, about 208 amperes on the 208-volt side of a 75 kVA transformer and about 90 amperes on the 480-volt side, is a number worth knowing by heart, because it lets you check transformer questions quickly. The voltage drop example uses the common approximate formula with a constant for copper and an illustrative conductor area; on the exam, take conductor properties from the references and apply the method the question asks for.

Business and law review

The thirty law and administration questions draw on the business guide, Circular E, Part 1926 and the Georgia law covered in this course. The topics that come up most often include business organization, contracts and change orders, lien law and lien waivers, insurance and bonds, payroll taxes and records, employment law basics, OSHA recordkeeping and construction standards, financial statements and ratios, and the licensing rules themselves. Many of these questions are direct lookups if the books are well tabbed, but a few require a calculation, such as an incident rate, a payroll tax amount or a simple financial ratio.

# Quick practice: business calculations (illustrative values)
current_assets, current_liabilities = 640_000, 410_000
print("Current ratio:", round(current_assets / current_liabilities, 2))
print("Working capital:", current_assets - current_liabilities, "dollars")

cases, hours = 3, 75_000
print("Incident rate:", round(cases * 200_000 / hours, 2))

contract, retain_share, billed = 180_000, 0.10, 120_000
print("Retainage held on billings:", round(billed * retain_share), "dollars")

Current ratio: 1.56
Working capital: 230000 dollars
Incident rate: 8.0
Retainage held on billings: 12000 dollars

These are the kinds of short calculations that appear in the business section: a current ratio of about 1.56, working capital of 230,000 dollars, an incident rate of 8.0 and retainage of 12,000 dollars on 120,000 dollars billed at a one-in-ten retainage. Each takes less than a minute if you know the formula, which is why it pays to practice them until they are automatic.

Worked practice questions

Reviewing a practice session

A practice session is only as useful as the review that follows it. After his first full four-hour session, Darnell scored 71 out of 100 on the practice set, which felt like a pass until Ruth asked him to sort the misses. He had lost six points on grounding and bonding, five on motors, four on load calculations and nine across the business questions, mostly on payroll taxes and lien waivers. Only three of his misses came from not knowing the material; the rest came from slow lookups, misread questions and arithmetic slips. That breakdown changed his plan for the next two weeks more than any score could have.

Keep a running log of every practice miss with its cause, the reference and the page where the answer lives, and the time it took. Over several sessions the log shows patterns: a chapter that always takes too long, a kind of question you misread, a formula you keep inverting. Those patterns are where the last weeks of study pay off most. A candidate who moves from 71 to 80 on practice sets usually does it by fixing lookups and reading habits, not by learning large amounts of new material.

Using the references efficiently

The exam allows the listed references, and the candidates who use them well treat them like tools on a truck: each has a place, and the hand goes to it without searching. Permanent tabs are generally allowed, while loose notes and inserted pages generally are not; check the current PSI handbook for the exact rules before tabbing, because books that do not meet them may be refused at check-in. Darnell used one tab color for NEC chapters, another for the tables he used most, a third for the business guide chapters and a fourth for Part 1926 subparts. He kept the number of tabs manageable, because a book with too many tabs is as slow as a book with none.

Learn the indexes too. Many questions are answered fastest by going to the index with a key word, then to the article, then to the section. For the business guide, the table of contents and chapter summaries often lead to the answer faster than the index. For Circular E, know where the deposit rules, the wage bracket method and the forms are. For Part 1926, know the subpart letters for the topics electrical contractors meet most: electrical, ladders, scaffolds, fall protection, excavations and personal protective equipment.

Exam day

Prepare the night before: books in a bag, identification in your wallet, calculator with fresh batteries, the testing center address in your phone, and a lunch if the center allows it. Sleep matters more than a last evening of cramming. Arrive early, check in calmly, and let the staff inspect the books. Use the tutorial to learn the screen. In each part, set your checkpoints in the first minute, work steadily, flag slow questions, and leave the last half hour for the flagged ones. Answer every question, because a blank is certainly wrong and a guess may not be.

Between the parts, eat something, drink water and walk around if you can. Do not spend the break replaying questions from Part I; they are finished. Part II deserves the same attention as Part I, and fatigue is the enemy late in an eight-hour day. Darnell's practice sessions had taught him that his accuracy dropped in the last hour, so he planned a two-minute pause every hour to stretch, look away from the screen and reset.

After the exam

Darnell walked out of the testing center in March with a passing score. On the drive home he called Ruth, who had already chilled a bottle of sparkling cider in the shop refrigerator. The next week Jen began the transition checklist: the license record, the company's connection to the license, the permit portals, the insurance certificates, the surety, the proposal templates and the truck lettering. A month later Tasha passed her Class I exam and filed the papers for her own company in Warner Robins. Caleb asked Darnell to sign his first experience log.

If you do not pass on the first try, read the score report by content area, adjust the plan, and schedule the retake inside the approval window. Remember that after two failures, a Board-approved review course is required before a third attempt. Many good contractors passed on their second try; what matters is the plan you follow afterward.