Practice exam review and test-day strategy

In early November 2026, before she mailed her application, Marit Halvorsen took a full practice exam at the Coteau Ridge office on a Saturday morning: 100 questions, five hours, her tabbed 2023 code book, Ugly's and a calculator, with Joanne Riedel watching the clock. She scored in the low eighties, which was where she had been for three weeks of practice sets. Dale Vermeer looked at the score sheet and said what experienced contractors always say: the score is fine, now look at what you missed. This lesson brings together the whole course into a review method, a final study plan and a test-day routine, and it closes with what happens after the score report prints.

Reviewing a practice exam

A practice exam is useful only if the review is better than the test. For each missed question, Marit recorded four things in her error log: the content area from the exam outline, the code article or South Dakota rule that answered it, how long she had spent, and why she missed it. She sorted the reasons into four groups. Lookup misses meant she knew where the rule was but could not find it fast enough. Wrong-rule misses meant she went to the wrong article. Reading misses meant she answered a different question from the one asked. Calculation misses meant she set the problem up correctly but made an arithmetic or table error. Each group calls for a different fix: more index practice, more article mapping, a habit of reading the last line first, or slower, written calculations.

On that practice exam, the log showed nineteen misses: seven reading, five lookup, four wrong rule and three calculation. Her score was being limited mostly by how she read questions, not by what she knew. For the next week, she practiced reading the last line of every question first and underlining the limiting words: minimum, maximum, not, except, shall, permitted. Her next practice set had only two reading misses.

# Error-log summary from a practice exam (illustrative)
misses = ["reading"] * 7 + ["lookup"] * 5 + ["wrong rule"] * 4 + ["calculation"] * 3
fixes = {"reading": "read the last line first; underline limiting words",
         "lookup": "timed index drills",
         "wrong rule": "map outline areas to articles",
         "calculation": "write every step; check table units"}
score = 100 - len(misses)
print(f"Practice score: {score} of 100 (pass mark 70)")
for reason in sorted(set(misses), key=lambda r: -misses.count(r)):
    print(f"{reason}: {misses.count(reason)} -> {fixes[reason]}")

Practice score: 81 of 100 (pass mark 70)
reading: 7 -> read the last line first; underline limiting words
lookup: 5 -> timed index drills
wrong rule: 4 -> map outline areas to articles
calculation: 3 -> write every step; check table units

The last two weeks

A final study plan should be lighter than the weeks before it. Marit's plan for the two weeks before her seat has three parts. First, two short timed sets per week in her weakest content areas, services and motors, using questions she had not seen. Second, one more full timed exam a week before the test, at the same hour as her real seat, followed by a full review. Third, a South Dakota law review, because the Commission's rules say the exam draws on state statutes and rules as well as the code. For the law review she will use the summary sections of Lessons 1 through 11 of this course and drill the numbers that most often appear in questions.

Five practice questions with reasoning

The questions below are written for this course in the style of the exam. Work each one before reading the reasoning.

Reading questions the way the exam writes them

Exam questions follow patterns, and recognizing them saves time. A question that begins with a long story about a building and ends with a short demand, such as what is the minimum size, wants one number from one rule; the story supplies only the facts that pick the row of a table or the right exception. A question that asks which of the following is not permitted is usually four permitted options and one forbidden one, so look for the one that breaks a rule rather than checking every rule for every option. A question that gives a calculated value among its options often includes the values a candidate would get by making the common mistakes, such as forgetting a demand factor or using the wrong conductor temperature column, so an answer that appears among the options is not proof that it is right.

State law questions have patterns too. They tend to test the boundaries of a license class, the order of steps in a process, or a single number from a rule. When a South Dakota law question lists four numbers, check whether two of them are close variants, such as 15 days and 15 business days, or 30 days and one month. The rule's exact unit is usually the point of the question. Marit keeps a one-page sheet of South Dakota numbers, the table in this lesson, and drills it the way she drills code lookups. The sheet stays home on exam day; the goal is to have it in her head by then.

The day before and the morning of

The day before the exam is for rest and logistics, not new material. Marit's checklist says to pack her code book, Ugly's and her key word index, check each for loose papers and sticky notes, pack her identification and the confirmation from Pearson VUE, and check the drive time to the test center with an extra half hour for winter roads. Then bed early. On the morning of the exam: a real breakfast, arrival thirty minutes early, and the wait used to look at nothing more demanding than the parking lot.

At check-in, staff verify identification and inspect reference books. Lockers hold everything else. Once seated, the candidate usually gets a short tutorial on the computer interface. The exam clock starts when the first question appears.

During the exam

The two-pass method from Lesson 4 is the core of the plan. On the first pass, answer every question that takes under two minutes and flag the rest. Keep an eye on the clock: after about two and a half hours, Marit wants to be through the first pass with roughly seventy questions answered. On the second pass, work flagged questions in the order of how close you came the first time. Leave fifteen minutes at the end to make sure every question has an answer. Change an answer only for a clear reason, such as finding the rule that settles it; a vague feeling is not a reason.

Calculations deserve their own routine. Write the formula on the scratch material provided, write each value with its unit, find each table value in the book rather than from memory, and check the answer against common sense. A 2,000-square-foot house does not need a 600-ampere service.

After the score report

Results print at the test center. A candidate who passes takes the score report home and starts the licensing steps from Lesson 3: within ninety days, pay the 200-dollar license fee, file the notarized undertaking, pay the 50-dollar deposit and put the certificate of insurance on file, unless the employer already meets those requirements. Only when the Commission issues the license may the new contractor buy permits and contract in his or her own name. A candidate who does not pass waits thirty days to retest, uses the score report's content-area feedback to target study, and books the next seat inside the time the Commission allows.

For Marit, the plan after passing is already written on Joanne's calendar: notarize the bond application Monday, mail it with the fee and deposit, ask the agent to issue the certificate to the Commission, and update the company's letterhead and permit records once the license number arrives. Dale has promised to stay on as an inactive licensee for a year so she can call him with questions, which, he says, is the best continuing education there is.