I'm not an electrician.

I've never wired anything and in fact I am afraid of even trying to do it.

A friend of mine was taking the IBEW aptitude test. He studied, took it, and came out the other side still not really sure how he'd done or what he should have spent his time on. That's the part that stuck with me. Not that the test is hard, it's supposed to be hard. It's that he went in blind and came out blind. And if it doesn't go well you're waiting three months minimum before you can sit it again, six or twelve at some locals. That's a long time to sit around wondering which part you should have studied.

My name's Bhav. What I'm actually good at is measuring learning. I studied math and statistics, I've done somewhere north of 700 tutoring sessions, and I spent a while as a data analyst at an education company where the job was basically working out whether people were learning or just felt like they were.

The thing you learn doing that is people are bad at diagnosing themselves. Give someone two algebra questions, one with fractions in it and one without. They get the clean one right, miss the fraction one, and walk away saying they're bad at algebra. They're probably not bad at algebra. They're bad at fractions. Those are different problems and they take different amounts of time to fix.

Mostly people who aren't coming at this straight out of a math class. If you haven't touched algebra in eight years, or you're changing careers, or you just don't know where you stand, that's who I had in mind.

I tutored a lot of non-traditional students. The thing that worked was never handing everyone the same course. It was working out where a specific person actually was and starting there. I wanted this to have the same patience a decent tutor has.

If you score low, I don't want the takeaway to be “I'm bad at this.” Chances are it wasn't everything. You'll see what you got right, not just what you missed. And where there's a gap, you'll see what to work on first and a free place to start on it, because the useful thing to know is that it's a finite amount of work and not an infinite amount.

The data you generate here also gets handed back to you. That's the point of collecting it. I've worked in analytics long enough to know that usually your data gets used to sell you something. Here it's just the thing that tells you where you are.

I wrote every question on it. The real exam's questions are secured, so nobody outside the test-maker has them and anyone selling you “real” ones is guessing. Mine are original, matched to the published structure of the real test, and every math answer is checked by code before it ever reaches you. A wrong answer key is the most damaging thing a practice test can do to a person, because they go away believing the wrong thing about themselves.

Your score comes back as a stanine, a 1 to 9 scale based on where you land relative to everyone else rather than the percentage you got right. And here's the part most prep sites leave out: it's an estimate. The official conversion tables aren't public, so I can't copy the real curve and neither can anyone else selling you prep. I'd rather tell you that than imply I have something I don't.