# Please Help! Ibew Apprentice Test!!



## cudaman (Oct 11, 2008)

can anybody help me with the test questions or have a study guide


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## Adam12 (May 28, 2008)

Checkout Chicagoguys thread. http://electriciantalk.com/showthread.php?t=2171


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## CubFan (Oct 8, 2008)

*IBEW #134 Construction Apprentice Test Overview*

I just took the Chicago (#134) test last week. I can't remember ALL of the specifics perfectly, but I'll try to give you the best breakdown I can. This may or may not be useful for those in other cities or locals, and the Construction apprentice registration and testing is closed for the year in Local #134, so I don't know how useful it will be immediately. 

I reference the study guide repeatedly. To get a copy of it, so helpfully uploaded by Chicagoguy, follow this link. Then open either link on the post to download the study guide. 

The test consisted of: 

*1. 30 numerical computation questions, otherwise known as arithmetic,* covering nearly all of the material contained in the study guide, including adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whole numbers, fractions, mixed numbers, and decimals. There were a few questions that covered negative integers. Overall, if you paid a decent amount of attention to the study guide, you should be fine. I went into the test concerned because it's been thirteen years since I took high school algebra. I left confident, but only because the majority of the material seemed to have been covered in sixth or seventh grade, which was fifteen or sixteen years ago. Scratch paper was provided and very much necessary. No calculators were permitted, but I don't think a calculator would have helped much anyway. I think we had twenty-five or thirty minutes for this section. 

*2. 22 numerical reasoning questions, covering number patterns. * These questions were more or less straight out of the study guide. A tip: a lot of these are easier to solve by working backwards from the right rather than forward from the left. For some reason, patterns are more obvious that way, at least for me. Scratch paper was provided and very helpful, but was collected after we completed this section. We were given about twenty minutes for this section. 
*
3. 30 paper folding questions*, again, pretty much straight out of the study guide. We were told that our first (and best) answer is the one that does not require the paper to be turned once it is unfolded. You would only choose the answer that requires the paper to be turned when unfolded if the first option isn't there. Some of these were kind of hard, because they require you to imagine a three-dimensional object being turned and manipulated, with no actual paper to turn and manipulate. We were given about thirty minutes for this section. 
*
4. 84 reading comprehension questions.* These questions were very similar to those in the study guide. A good strategy is to read the question, then skim through the reading sample to find the answer, and choose the best one. Many of the questions could be answered without reading the paragraph. There were about fifty questions that were related to reading samples, and about thirty or so that were more along the lines of: 
_Q. Birds have_
a. Windows
b. Doors
c. Wings
d. Shoes

Obviously, the correct answer is c, wings. We were given about thirty minutes for this section, but I finished quite early. The first thirty questions or so were like the one above, and I breezed through them in about five minutes. 
*
5. 45 mechanical aptitude questions.* This was a little out of left field for me, as it was the only topic not covered by the study guide. The questions covered logic and reasoning by asking about which way gears would turn, pulleys, which gear turns the fastest, which side of the scale is heavier, etc. If you are reasonably mechanically inclined, this section should only pose a minor challenge. We were given about thirty minutes to complete this section. 

The test took about two hours and fifteen minutes to complete. It was administered by a private human resources company, not by the IBEW itself. They requested that we only use their pencils, which were provided, and their scratch paper, again provided, although the scratch paper was collected after the two numerical sections and not returned. After we were finished and the papers were collected, we were told that we could expect to hear from the Union around December 1. 

I hope that I've given a decent overview of what you may see on your apprentice test. Wish me luck that I did well.


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