Tips on how to pass the CWI exam in 2024!

The Certified Welding Inspector examination is one of the hardest exams in the industry. It covers a wide and deep range of topics regarding welding, safety, metallurgy, and inspection.

In this article, I will give out some tips that I did when preparing for the CWI exam!

Enroll in a good training or review provider

The review and training provider will guide you through the necessary knowledge base for the exam since the exam is quite difficult, good instructors will help simplify this knowledge.

Enhance your vocabulary with welding

It will be much easier to study and prepare for the exam if you know what you are reading first and foremost. It does not matter if you are an engineer, welder, a welding inspector even if you are not familiar with the language, you are in for a difficult time. Some references like welding handbooks, AWS Terms and Definitions, even familiarizing with the code that you are opting to take the exam in with Part C will surely help. If you want to know what these parts of the exam cover, please see here .

Have a study plan and follow it!

Just like any other certification exam, you need to have quality alone time to study. Allot even just an hour of your time to go through your notes or familiarize yourself with the standards. If you are enrolled in a training provider, still have that time to study alone to reinforce that knowledge. If you are not a super-smart person who can study in one night, then you have to study a little each day, it truly adds up.

Take good notes

Recreating the lecture given by the training provider will enable you to understand easily the lessons. What I did is I tried to jot down any useful notes, snippets, and knowledge pieces that the instructor was saying. By the time I got home, I read those notes to reinforce my learning.

Answer sample or practice questions!

This will surely help in getting acclimated with the type of questions that normally appear in the exam just make sure that the sources of these questions are reliable and came from legitimate sources. You are in luck because I have compiled 50 CWI questions here that will help you in the Part A of the CWI exam

Sticky notes!

In relation with the open book part of the exam, one way to locate the necessary tables and clauses is to mark them with sticky notes.- Another tip is to color code them separately for chapter headings, important clauses, and tables.

If you are a welding inspector, an engineer or just interested to become a CWI, I also have a video guide right here on how to become a Certified Welding Inspector, I discussed here the different parts of the exam, its requirements and shared the tips as well in video format.