A five-character numbering system has been developed to systematically identify every examination question in every question pool. The five-character designators do not use hyphens. For example: G1A01
The first character identifies the license class of the question pool.
T = Technician
G = General
E = Extra Class
The second character is the subelement number. For example:
1 = FCC rules
2 = Amateur station operating procedures
3 = Radio wave propagation characteristics
4= Amateur radio practices
5 = Electrical principles
6 = Circuit components
7 = Practical circuits
8 = Signals and emissions
9 = Antennas and feedlines
0 = RF / Electrical Safety
The third character is always a letter of the alphabet, and:
refers to the general topic of the question, as specified in the syllabus for the question group. There are always as many subjects (or groups) within a subelement as there are questions from the subelement on an amateur examination.
See Table 5.1 for the number of questions that must be selected from each topic to properly prepare an examination. If the examination is to contain nine questions, then there will also be nine syllabus groups of questions designated with a sequential letter in the subelement. These nine groups are designated: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I.
The fourth and fifth characters are:
the sequential numbers within the syllabus group. Two characters are always used, even for numbers that are normally a single digit. (A zero is used as the "tens" digit for the numbers 1 through 9.) The FCC rules requires that a question pool contain at least ten times the number of questions as will be used on a single examination. While "ten times" rule applies only to the entire question pool, the QPC applies it to each sub-element and even to each syllabus grouping as well. Thus each group has at least ten questions and usually more to allow for future deleted questions caused by changes in technology or FCC rules.
A complete list of the current pools can be found on www.ncvec.org for download and review.
There are 35 examination questions each in Element 2 and 3, and 50 in Element 4.