The Electrician’s Skip-it System™
During the time that I was the Master Electrician Examiner, I also monitored the electricians’ progress while they were writing their exam. So, if an electrician needed any help in understanding the rationale or intent of any of the test questions, I was right there and could easily answer any question for clarification.
It was not uncommon to see an electrician spending too much time on a single question. This was very frustrating for the electrician writing the exam and frustrating for me, as well. It is no fun watching one of our electricians get caught up in the moment. I discovered, while proctoring an exam room full of electricians writing the Masters Exam, that we electricians were all in need of a system or template to answer questions. That is, a system that would allow for successfully answering a sequence of multiple choice questions. This template would be used consistently and constantly for a period of hours that would lead to successful exam writing.
Ask three electricians how to do a job and you will get five answers.!
The Electrician’s Skip-it System™
ROUND 1: 30 SECONDS PER QUESTION – 25% OF EXAM TIME – 45 minutes
If you can’t answer the question within 30 seconds, skip-it and go to the next question
ROUND 2: 60 SECONDS PER QUESTION – 30% OF EXAM TIME – 54 MINUTES
If you can’t answer the question within 60 seconds, skip-it and go to the next question
ROUND 3: 120 SECONDS PER QUESTION – 30% OF EXAM TIME – 54 MINUTES
If you can’t answer the question within 120 seconds, skip- it and go to the next question
ROUND 4: # SECONDS PER QUESTION – 15% OF EXAM TIME – 27 MINUTES
Time for an educated guess using the process of elimination—never leave any question unanswered
What this basically means is that if I don’t know the answer to a question or I encounter a question that I am not sure about the question itself- I Skip-it. And I will skip the next question, and the next question as well as I might even skip the next question on my first pass through the entire exam, which I call Round 1. This means to me, on Round 1, I catch the low hanging fruit, that is, the easy questions that I know about and know that I am going to get the right answer!
Then, on to the harder questions- the questions that take more time in Round 2. It is a process, a system, a template to be used for Round 3 and Round 4 – over and over again for any electrical exam- only the percentages of exam time will change based on the particular exam your writing.
The point of all of this, is to pass the exam without rushing- answering the question methodically and without pressure, using the Skip-it system.
