What the wrong options are built from, and what each guessing rule costs you

What a wrong option is for

Every item in the 500-question bank behind this site carries four options, one keyed answer and three wrong ones, and all 1,500 wrong options carry a recorded line saying what error produces them. That field is the point of the whole exercise. A distractor is a mistake somebody expected you to make, written down.

Two consequences follow. Finding your own figure among the options is weak evidence, because a competent writer put the likely mistakes in the list on purpose and one of them may be the mistake you just made. And an option that looks like nothing you would have produced deserves a read anyway, because on a well built item there is no filler. Plenty of items in the bank key on the option that is the only one nobody computed, and a candidate eliminating on strangeness strikes it first.

How PSI builds a Texas item, how many options it carries and where its distractors come from are unpublished. What follows is countable in a bank we wrote and can show you.

The margin you are defending

The pass mark is seventy percent on each portion, and the portions are scored separately. On the journeyman calculations paper that is 17 of 24 scored items, so roughly seven wrong answers is the entire budget. On the knowledge paper it is 40 of 56 scored items, which leaves about sixteen.

Put the clock beside it. The knowledge portion allows 130 minutes for 59 items, about two minutes twelve seconds each. Calculations allows 110 minutes for 26, about four minutes fourteen. The master papers run 150 minutes for 75 items and 170 for 33.

Those two figures together are what price a guessing rule. A trick that costs you the keyed answer on one item in twenty is spending a seventh of your calculations budget to save a few seconds, which is why the sections below put a number on each rule before recommending anything. Pacing has a page of its own at minutes per question, and it is the other half of this.

The absolutes rule, tested

The advice that circulates in this trade says to strike any option containing always, never, all, none, every or only. It's testable, so here it's tested against the bank.

Those six words appear in 197 of the 1,500 wrong options, 13.1 percent, and in 22 of the 500 keyed answers, 4.4 percent. The lean is real. An absolute is about three times likelier in a wrong option than it is in the right one.

The cost is where it stops being a rule. Applied as elimination it removes the keyed answer on about one item in twenty-three, against a calculations budget of seven wrong answers. The figures also move as soon as the word list moves. Add a bare no and the counts go to 263 wrong options and 60 keyed answers, because a yes-or-no item makes No the answer about half the time. A rule that sensitive to how you write it down is doing something other than measuring the item.

The code writes absolutes because some rules are absolute. An answer stating that every conductor in a shared raceway is insulated for the highest voltage present reads like a trap and is the keyed answer.

The longest option rule, tested

The other standing rule says to pick the longest option. Across the 500 items the keyed answer is strictly the longest on 96 of them and tied for longest on 96 more, leaving 308 where it is one of the shorter ones. Four options, right about a quarter of the time, which is what picking at random does.

There's a cue in the aggregate and it's useless per item. Keyed options average 44.1 characters against 40.7 for the wrong ones, because a right answer often carries the condition that makes it right. Item writers are told to review a set for exactly that and even it out, so the cue decays as a pool improves, and from your chair you have no way of measuring how good this pool is.

What both surface rules have in common is that each one exploits a flaw in how an item was written, and the published guidance on writing items exists to remove those flaws. That puts the value of a folk rule on a downward slope while the pool it is aimed at gets better.

The families that decide items

Sorting the recorded reasons in the bank gives a handful of families that keep reappearing, and most of them are specific to a code examination.

• Stopped early. The chain has two steps and the option is the value after one of them, such as an ambient correction applied with the conductor-count adjustment left out.
• Wrong operation on the right numbers. Two factors added where they multiply, two limits averaged where no rule permits it, a one-way length where the calculation wants the round trip.
• The answer to the next question along. The branch circuit figure where the feeder figure was asked, or the nameplate current where the code names a table value.
• The scope answer. A real rule, correctly stated, that fails to reach the case in the stem because the stem said commercial, or feeder, or wet.
• The status answer. An annex or an informational note quoted as though it carried force. Informative annexes sit outside the requirements by their own wording, and 90.5(C) puts informational notes in the same position.
• The habit answer. A multiplier you have applied a hundred times, offered in a place the code declines to ask for it.

The scope family is the expensive one, because every option is a true sentence and only one of them is true of this installation. A scope error also looks exactly like a knowledge gap on a score report, which sends the next study cycle at the wrong target.

The superseded answer this autumn

One family is loaded between now and the end of the year. Texas moved the examinations to the 2026 National Electrical Code on 1 September 2026 under 16 TAC 73.100, and an option that was keyed in the previous edition is the most plausible wrong option there is. Nobody has to invent it.

Load calculations are the clean case. They sat in Article 220 in every edition before this one and they are Article 120 now, so an option naming 220 is a correct answer to the same question asked last year. The 2026 edition also ran a uniform section template through the book, putting listing requirements at .2 of an article and reconditioned equipment at .3, which displaced whatever used to occupy those slots. An older citation for overcurrent protection at 450.3 now lands on a heading with its subsections marked reserved, which reads as though you are in the right neighborhood.

Grounding for systems over 1000 volts left Article 250 for a new Article 270 in the same cycle. Informative Annex L is where the book tracks its own renumbering, setting the article numbers of successive editions in adjacent columns, and the navigation page covers using it under time pressure.

The Texas overlay

Seven of the 51 items in the exam-behavior area of the bank carry answers that change at the state line, which makes them the family a national study guide gets wrong for you.

• The hours pair. 16 TAC 73.21(b) opens the journeyman examination at 7,000 hours and Tex. Occ. Code 1305.155 requires 8,000 before the license issues, so an item asking about one of them offers you the other.
• The expiration date. A Texas electrical license runs one year from issuance under 16 TAC 73.22(a). The December date that turns up in older sources is the statutory default at Tex. Occ. Code 1305.167(a), which the department displaced by rule under the authority in subsection (b).
• The amended exception. 16 TAC 73.100(b) adopted a ground-fault exception for listed outdoor heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment while leaving out the sunset sentence the national text carries, so the national expiry has no reach here.
• The renewal hours. 16 TAC 73.25 sets four hours of continuing education before each renewal, from a provider registered with the department, and the same course earns that credit once.

Each of those is a place where a correct national answer is a wrong Texas answer, and the edition page carries the adoption side of it in full.

The check that does work

When you have computed a figure and it's sitting in the list, spend a few seconds asking which specific error produces each of the other options.

Accounting for every option you passed over should raise your confidence, because you have found the design of the item and you are standing outside it. Where two options look as though they came from nowhere, re-read the stem, because the likeliest explanation is that you answered a neighboring question and those two strange options are answers to the one actually asked.

Price the habit before you adopt it. Five seconds an item across 59 knowledge items is about five minutes out of 130. Across 26 calculations items it is a little over two minutes out of 110. Spend it on the items where you produced a number, and skip it on the ones you read straight out of the book.

The habit that pays more costs one extra reading of the stem: name the installation before you compare options. Dwelling or commercial, service or feeder or branch circuit, indoors or out, above or below whatever threshold the article uses. An option that ignores the qualifier you just named is answering a neighboring question.

What a wrong answer costs later

On the day, a wrong answer costs a mark against a budget of about seven on the calculations paper. After the day it costs $78 for the retake and a slice of the one year window that 16 TAC 73.20(b) starts when the department receives your application.

The statewide figures put a scale on that. In fiscal 2025 the journeyman calculations portion passed 1,301 of 6,328 candidates and the knowledge portion 1,402 of 5,731, with 6,181 passes across every Texas electrical examination out of 26,303 sittings. TDLR wrote in its June 2026 rulemaking that the first time passage rate for the journeyman examination has historically run below 30 percent, and named the resulting shortage of journeymen as its reason for opening a faster route into the trade.

The worked arithmetic behind every item, with the section it comes from printed under it, lives in the question set. This page stays on the Texas side of the same material: what these families cost a candidate here, and what a lost sitting costs after it. If a failed attempt is what brought you, the page on reading the score report comes next.

Questions people ask

Should I strike options containing always or never?

The lean is real and it is small. In the 500-item bank those six absolute words appear in 197 of the 1,500 wrong options, 13.1 percent, and in 22 of the 500 keyed answers, 4.4 percent, so an absolute is about three times likelier in a wrong option. Used as elimination it removes the right answer on roughly one item in twenty-three, against a calculations budget of about seven wrong answers. Treat it as a tiebreaker when you have already reasoned yourself to two options, and let the code text decide everything else.

Is the longest option usually the answer?

It's the answer about as often as chance says it should be. Across the 500 items the keyed answer is strictly the longest on 96 and tied for longest on 96 more, so on 308 items it is one of the shorter ones. Four options picked at random are right a quarter of the time, and this rule lands close to that. There is a faint aggregate cue, since keyed options average 44.1 characters against 40.7 for wrong ones, because a right answer often carries the condition that makes it right. Per item it tells you nothing.

Why do so many wrong options look correct?

Because they are correct somewhere else. The expensive family is the scope answer, where every option states a real rule accurately and only one of them states a rule that reaches the case in the stem. The rule might be written for dwellings when the stem is commercial, or for services when the stem is a feeder, or for damp locations when the stem describes the inside of an outdoor raceway. The defense is to name the installation before you compare options, which costs one extra reading of the stem and catches the whole family.

Which wrong answers are specific to Texas?

Seven of the 51 items in the exam-behavior area of the bank turn on something Texas decided. The 7,000 hours that open the examination under 16 TAC 73.21(b) sit next to the 8,000 that Tex. Occ. Code 1305.155 requires for the license. A Texas license runs one year from issuance under 16 TAC 73.22(a), while older sources quote the December default in the statute. And 16 TAC 73.100(b) adopted a ground-fault exception without the sunset sentence the national text carries, so the national expiry has no reach in this state.

Does any of this help on a question I do not understand?

No, and the guidance behind good item writing says so plainly. A well built option set is arranged so that test-taking skill on its own fails to get there, and the writers are told to remove the cues that would reward it. What surface reading does is convert material you already know into more marks than it would otherwise produce, and catch your own slips in the seconds before you commit. On a paper that absorbs about seven wrong answers, catching two of your own is most of the difference between the two outcomes.