I did the 2382 test yesterday. A few tips I picked up, for you and anyone else who's interested.. You do need to spend time with the red book until you really get familiar with how it's laid out. Understanding the information in it won't be the problem. As you say, finding the information quickly is what it's all about. When you do the trial exams off the internet or papers from your college, note down the reference number where you found the answer to each question rather than just answering it off the top of your head. This gives you practice at looking things up the right way.
Remember the number of questions you can expect to get from each of the eight sections (Part numbers 1-7 plus Appendices in the book). The questions seem to be given in this order:
Part 1 - 4 questions
Part 2 - 3 questions
Part 3 - 5 questions
Part 4 - 14 questions
Part 5 - 15 questions
Part 6 - 6 questions
Part 7 - 10 questions
Appendices - 3 questions
Note that the Special Locations chapters are indexed in the same sequence as the first 6 Parts of the book. For example:
Section 701 Locations containing a bath or shower
Section 701.1 = Scope
Section 701.3 = Assessment of General Characteristics
Section 701.4 = Protection for Safety
Section 701.5 = Selection and Erection of equipment
Remembering this makes finding information quicker once you are familiar with how the first 6 sections are structured.
Put post-it note tabs in the contents, index and the start of each Part number and each Appendix number. This makes looking things up much quicker. Practice using the contents pages - starting with the Main contents page, the Part number contents pages and Chapter contents pages to drill down to the specific information you need, or else use the index if you know what you need to be looking for already. If you find yourself flicking through randomly trying to see something that matches what you're looking for it should be a warning that you're wasting time and should really be using the book's indexing which after a while does make a lot of sense. Timewise, I found the most economical way to do the test is to go through and answer each question but don't spend a long time on those that you have trouble with. Just answer them as best you can but flag these ones, then when you get to the end, go through the list of flagged questions and spend a bit more time looking for the answer and when you find the exact reference in the book, unflag it until your list of flagged questions is empty. This way if you run out of time at least you will have answered all the easy ones! If you're doing one of these three day courses you really need to do a fair bit of reading before you get there as in my opinion three days is really not much time to get familiar with the book. Good luck.
