2 Questions to people who have passed. 1. How much time did you have left? 2. How many problems did you have an example of?

1) Hey guys, again congrats on passing! I had a couple of questions. I plan on taking the exam in "passes". So once you finished all your paces, and had answers (or a guess) for everything and shifted into "ok now I have time to back check my work" how much time was left on the clock? I am generally a fast test tacker and I'm curious how much time most people had left to either check work or start "digging through reference books " to hunt for 1 or 2 conceptual problems at end. 

2) I see so many people suggesting about building a binder with example problems and it have it indexed. I have a lot of example problems printed out but I was just curious on what percentage of "math / workable problems" (not conceptual) did you have a go-by or a decent example for? 

Happy New Year and let's pass this thing!

Generally on all my practice exams and the actual exam, I was mostly done with an hour remaining. During the last hour I would be scouring through my reference books for 4-5 very difficult questions. I'd then spend about 3 mins making sure I'd transferred all my answers to my scantron correctly. I think this depends on what type of test taker you are. Through my whole life I have made very minimal what would be called "careless errors" when taking exams so I didn't feel a need to save time to recheck my math on a lot of problems. However, if that's an issue that you know you struggle with save 15-30 mins for that.

Regarding index binders, the likelihood of you having worked an exact duplicate can be pretty low. But you may know of similar problems for math or even conceptual problems that will allow you to go back to an old practice exam and look for a problem. I know I solved a couple problems in the morning and afternoon session in this manner. Having an index can help you tremendously by giving a general location of where that problem was. For example, you could know you need a power factor correction problem and it was from the NCEES practice exam but that's all you remember. Pull up your index for that exam and you'll find 2-3 questions that are a possibility of the one you need. Flip to those and find which one you were wanting. This saves so much time rather than flipping through every question. So much of the exam is down to your organization of reference materials and saving precious time and shaving seconds here and there that will let you spend 2 more minutes at the end searching for that last problem in your references.

1) I had about an hour in the morning and afternoon sessions to check my work. I tried to work quickly as I took the exam circling the exam question number if I felt like I needed to go over it again. There were a few questions that I needed some extensive time to look up, but I thought I had in my reference material and that is what I primarily focused on during the hour I had remaining. 

2) I think there was 1 that was close to one of the practice exams. I created a binder with formula sheets and some problems worked out that I tended to struggle with. It helped a lot, but the best thing I did was index the NEC really well with things I thought were going to be topics on the exam. I saved a lot of time by knowing where to go in the NEC. 

SparkyBill said:

1) Hey guys, again congrats on passing! I had a couple of questions. I plan on taking the exam in "passes". So once you finished all your paces, and had answers (or a guess) for everything and shifted into "ok now I have time to back check my work" how much time was left on the clock? I am generally a fast test tacker and I'm curious how much time most people had left to either check work or start "digging through reference books " to hunt for 1 or 2 conceptual problems at end. 

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For reference, I was pretty fast at taking exams in school. Literally always the first one done when taking an exam, but on the PE there was a little more at stake so I took my time. On the exam, first pass was 1.5 taking my time to not miss anything and read questions multiple times. 45 Minutes for second pass. 45 Minutes for third pass. Then the remaining time just reading every question again making sure nothing was missed. (Except the afternoon session, I split after I finished the 3rd pass.)

SparkyBill said:

2) I see so many people suggesting about building a binder with example problems and it have it indexed. I have a lot of example problems printed out but I was just curious on what percentage of "math / workable problems" (not conceptual) did you have a go-by or a decent example for? 

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I didn't go back to reference any practice problems. I felt like I knew what to do every time I came across a math-based question. My references were for the conceptual questions.

I had 15 minutes left.  I just kinda sat there and prayed until they called time.  And I ate some candy