Last night, the National Council of Volunteer Examiner Coordinators finally released the updated Extra Class question pool. This is three weeks later than the release date of the 2016 Extra Class question pool.
This question pool has 622 questions, vs. more than 700 for the previous one. (Since this is a pretty big change, I counted them again just now to make sure.) I haven’t had a chance to compare them at all yet, but it will be interesting to see what questions have been deleted. I would imagine they’ve added a few questions, too. One enterprising fellow on reddit wrote, “393/622 questions in the 2020 extra pool are identical to questions int he previous pool; that leaves 229 questions which will require manual review to see if they match to old questions or not.”
I am a bit miffed that they didn’t ask me for any input, even if only to do a little copy editing. The lack of copy editing has been my biggest beef with the amateur radio question pools.
Here’s just one example from a quick scan of the latest question pool. Section E9G contains questions about the Smith Chart. Capitalizing both “Smith” and “Chart” is the proper way to spell it out. The question pool, however, spells it “Smith chart.” As a former engineering trade magazine editor, this is very frustrating.