So I am having my first crack at the Red Seal IP plumbing exam this coming Friday and I am nervous as hell. Has anyone written the exam recently? Does anyone have any tips? I still have 5 more days out at school that is purely review time. I feel like I know the code book very good but some the non-residential stuff may really get me. Also everything I work on is in the the city so I have to do a crash refresher on my pumps and rural waste systems for sure. So if this is a bit of a ramble but I am just being nervous and am trying to start a thread to getting some tips.
I think I have the math, DWV, water sizing and most of the code book down pretty good. It's open book code. I don't know it inside out with regard to exact numbers but I know exactly how the book is organized and know where to find things.
Oh man am I nervous.
haha
I'm not going to lie to you it was actually quite a hard test. Many people fail the first go around. When I was in school the class that went through before me had a 79% fail rate!!!!!!!! My class wasn't that bad but still quite a few of them failed.
The thing about the IP test is that you get questions out of left field that no matter how much or how hard you study you won't know the answer to the question unless you've had real world experience in whatever they are asking you.
I would say that you should consider probably about 5% of the test to be questions like this. Your teacher *SHOULD* give you a rough percentage of whats dedicated to what on the exam. Like on my IP I got asked a question about a cooling tower. Well in BC here plumbers don't do cooling at all and there was nothign about that in my notes etc because its not even studied here.
The thing with the IP is that as long as 70% of the provinces plumbers perform a specific task it's eligible to asked about on the IP.
The other thing with the IP is that you can study a bunch of one thing and only get asked 2 or 3 questions on it. So you have to study EVERYTHING well and know a good portion about everything. So don't study too much of the stuff you already know very well.
One thing I did to save time was put TABS into my code book so that I could find each section easier. This helped quite a bit because you don't get that much time per question. I think it's 115 questions and you get 2 hours to write it. But don't quote me on that because I don't remember the exact numbers.
Anyway study hard and FOCUS when you're doing the test. Everyone has their own method of writting tests so stick to what you know and are good at. For me I just go through the questions one at a time and if I get stuck on a question I somehow mark the test so I come back to the question and I keep going. No sense in wasting time on questons you're just guessing at!
GOOD LUCK!
