How hard is the Michigan journeyman electrician exam?

What makes it hard

• The 75% bar. You can miss only 20 of 80 questions. That is five points tighter than the 70% most states pass at, so the margin for a careless slip is thin.
• The clock. 80 questions in 2 hours 30 minutes works out to roughly under two minutes each, and the calculation problems eat that budget faster than the recall ones.
• The open-book trap. Open book sounds easy. It is not. If you do not know the code well enough to land on the right article in seconds, flipping pages drains your time and the open book works against you.
• The math is timed, not deep. A dwelling load calc you would run clean at the kitchen table has to come together in well under two minutes here, with the meter running.

What the pass rate does and does not tell you

LARA does not publish a journeyman electrician pass rate, so any number you see floating around is a guess. That is honest, not a dodge. What we do know is documented: the bar is 75%, the format is 80 questions in 2 hours 30 minutes, and Michigan tests on the 2023 NEC. Treat the 75% cutoff as the real signal of difficulty, because it leaves you less room than a state passing at 70%.

The open-book trap, in plain terms

You bring your own books into the Michigan exam: a bound 2023 NEC, the Michigan Electrical Code Part 8 rules, and the two state acts behind the trade. The catch is the reference rule. Factory tabs and printed markings are fine. Handwritten notes, your own index, and the NEC Handbook are not. So you cannot annotate your way to a pass. The book rewards the candidate who already knows roughly where every rule lives. The candidate who plans to look up everything runs out of clock around question 50.

How to beat it

1. Run a free diagnostic first to find the NEC chapters costing you the most, before you study anything broad.
2. Drill those weak chapters until you can set up the calculation without peeking at the answer.
3. Train open-book lookup speed in your own tabbed 2023 NEC, so you land on the right article in seconds, not minutes.
4. Run full-length timed simulations the last two weeks to lock in your pace and your skip-and-flag habit.

Most guys who fail the Michigan journeyman exam know the work. They lose on pace and on lookup, not on knowledge. Fix those two things and the 75% bar stops looking like a wall.