NASCLA Accredited Contractors Exam

On March 12th 2008, the National Association of State Contractors Licensing Agencies (NASCLA) named Psychological Services Inc. (PSI) as the first NASCLA-Approved Provider for the Accredited Examination for Commercial General Building Contractors. A short time later on May 14th 2009, Professional Examination Service (PES) was also added to the list as an approved provider of the new exam.

So, what is the new exam and how does it affect you? Let’s assume you are a state certified Commercial Contractor. Opportunity knocks and you have a chance to build in another state. While some states do have a reciprocal agreement with regard to accepting another states contractor license to work in their state, most do not. You can be sure that the state you need to go to will not have a reciprocal agreement with your state if your luck is like mine. This means you must begin preparation for another states General Contractor exam in order to work there.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was just one General Contractor exam that was accepted by every state? This is what NASCLA is working towards and Alabama was the first state to jump on board with the new Accredited Examination in September of 2009. Since then, South Carolina has also started administering the Accredited Examination. While North Carolina and Tennessee are not yet administering the exam, they are accepting the Accredited Examination if you have passed it in another state. PSI is the exam administrator for these four states and I’m sure they are putting the hard sell on the other states they conduct examinations for. Those other states are Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington. That’s 19 states in all.

The new Accredited Examination is a multiple choice, open book exam that is non-code focused. There are 125 questions; 115 of them are scored while the remaining 10 are pretest questions. After passing the exam your results are sent to the NASCLA Examination Program Database (NED). Both applicants and states will be able to access NED to send or retrieve examination results.
Here’s a breakdown of the content on the exam:

• Estimating, Bidding, and Preconstruction Services 20%
• Project Management 24%
• Project Construction 28%
• Project Closeout 8%
• Organizational and Financial Management 20%

The allotted time for the exam is 4 hours and you must score 70% or better to pass.

Just in case you didn’t pick up on this at the beginning, this is for Commercial Contractor’s only. This change has no bearing on the Residential Builder at this time. Obviously, for those of you are hoping to become a Commercial Contractor in one of the participating states, this is good news, especially if your plans are to grow your company and operate in other states. In the event your plans are to stay local to your area, this new exam is probably not earth shattering news… but, it is a great improvement to the industry as a whole.

Stuart Winston
www.mycontractorslicense.com

About the Author:
Stuart Winston is a state-certified contractor in multiple states in the US. His career in building construction started in the 1980’s when he was a regional manager for one of the largest lumber companies in the US. He began his general contracting career in Florida in the early 90’s as a custom home builder. Stuart is a highly sought after speaker and trainer in the construction industry, and the founder and principal author of Great Southern Seminars contractor licensing exam preparation courses. During his career, Stuart has trained thousands of students though his contractor licensing programs. www.mycontractorslicense.com

Welcome to Great Southern Seminars!

We have created this blog site to enable our authors and customers to discuss news, issues, and just about anything related to construction and contractor licensing.  Our focus is to bring you news and events as they relate to the licensing and contractor license exams so that our community is aware of the issues facing our  industry today.  Please share your thoughts, questions, concerns, or any useful information that will help your fellow contractors in the future….