Ham Exam Study Planner
The 74% pass mark only asks for 66% knowledge, because a quarter of what you do not know you get right anyway.
Coverage against pass probability
How sure do you want to be?
The three exams
Each pass mark is about 74 per cent, and each therefore asks for about 66 per cent of the pool. The last column is what pure guessing achieves.
A 74 per cent pass mark asks for 66 per cent
Every question on every amateur licence exam offers four answers, so a quarter of what you do not know you get right anyway. Scoring the 74.3 per cent needed to pass — 26 of 35 — corresponds to genuinely knowing 65.7 per cent of the pool. The pass mark overstates the study by nearly nine percentage points, and people aiming to learn three quarters of the material are aiming past the bar without realising it.
That is not an argument for guessing, which is arithmetic rather than strategy: answering a Technician paper entirely at random passes about once in 758 million attempts, and an Extra once in two trillion. Guessing is a top-up on questions you mostly know, and nothing else. What the four-option structure buys you is margin — at 70 per cent coverage you pass three times in four, and at 80 per cent about 97 times in 100.
One result that is not obvious: the longer exam is harder when you are under-prepared and easier when you are ready. Variance cuts both ways. At half the pool learned the 35-question paper passes 10.1 per cent of the time against 6.0 for the 50-question one, because a short exam leaves more room for luck — but above about 67 per cent coverage it reverses, 97.1 against 98.7 at 80 per cent, because a long exam also leaves less room for bad luck. And pool size changes none of the odds at all; it only changes how many questions you must read to reach a given coverage.
How to use
- Pick the exam and enter what fraction of the pool you already know.
- Read the pass chance, not just the expected score — they differ.
- Set a confidence target and study to that number of questions.
- Get the question pool itself free from the NCVEC; it is not on this page.
Frequently asked questions
How much of the question pool do I need to know to pass?
About 66 per cent for even odds, which is less than the pass mark suggests. Every question offers four answers, so a quarter of what you do not know you get right anyway — scoring the 74.3 per cent needed to pass corresponds to genuinely knowing 65.7. For a comfortable pass rather than a coin flip you want around 75 per cent, and 80 gives you roughly 97 chances in 100.
Can I pass a ham radio exam by guessing?
No, and the arithmetic is not close. Answering a 35-question Technician paper entirely at random passes about once in 758 million attempts; the 50-question Extra once in two trillion. Guessing is a useful top-up on questions you partly know, and it is worth answering every question since there is no penalty for a wrong one, but it is not a study plan.
What is the pass mark for the amateur radio exams?
Seventy-four per cent on all three. Technician and General are 35 questions needing 26 correct, which is 74.3 per cent; Amateur Extra is 50 questions needing 37, which is 74.0. The consistency is deliberate, and it means all three ask for roughly the same fraction of genuine knowledge even though the Extra has far more material behind it.
Is the longer Extra exam harder?
In an interesting way, yes and no. Because it has more questions there is less room for luck — so if you are under-prepared it is harder than a 35-question paper, and if you are well prepared it is actually safer. At half the pool learned the odds are 10.1 per cent against 6.0; at 80 per cent they reverse to 97.1 against 98.7. Variance cuts both ways.
Does a bigger question pool make an exam harder?
Not in terms of odds, only in terms of work. The pass probability depends on the fraction of the pool you know, the number of questions and the pass mark — nothing else. A 412-question pool and a 622-question pool give identical curves at the same coverage. What changes is that 66 per cent of 412 is 272 questions to study and 66 per cent of 622 is 411.
Are the exam questions published in advance?
Yes, all of them, which is unusual and often misread as making the exam trivial. It does not: there are several hundred questions and the exam draws one from each of thirty-five or fifty groups, so rote-learning that many answer letters is genuinely harder than understanding the material. Treat the published pool as a syllabus and it is much faster.
Does this page have the actual exam questions?
No, deliberately. The pools run to several hundred questions with four answers each, which is hundreds of kilobytes against a page budget of forty — so shipping a twenty-question sample and calling it a trainer would be worse than saying plainly that it is not here. The pools are published free by the NCVEC and every legitimate practice site draws from the same public text.
How long does it take to study for a Technician licence?
That depends entirely on your rate, which is why the planner asks. At twenty questions a day, going from nothing to the roughly 310 questions that give ninety per cent confidence on a 412-question pool is about fifteen days. People with an electronics background go far quicker because much of the pool is already known rather than learned.
Should I study evenly across topics or focus on the big ones?
Evenly, and more evenly than the coverage number implies. The exam draws from every subelement rather than sampling the pool freely, so a topic you skip entirely costs you its questions with certainty rather than on average. This model assumes your knowledge is spread uniformly, which is the optimistic case — uneven study performs worse than the same coverage suggests.
How often do the question pools change?
Every four years, on a staggered cycle so the three elements do not all change at once. A pool is published several months before it takes effect and the outgoing one stays valid until its expiry date, which occasionally means two versions are in circulation. Always check that a practice resource is using the current pool for your element.
Is there a penalty for a wrong answer?
No. Nothing is deducted, so leaving a question blank is strictly worse than guessing at it — a blank scores zero where a guess scores a quarter of a mark on average. Across nine questions you can afford to miss on a 35-question paper, that difference is worth a little over two marks, which is occasionally the difference between passing and not.
What does each licence class let me do?
Technician grants everything above 30 megahertz plus limited HF — chiefly CW segments and one voice slice on 10 metres. General adds most of HF, about 87 per cent of the amateur allocation by bandwidth. Amateur Extra adds the remaining segments, which are small but sit at the bottom edges of the bands where the DX operates.
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