Jason-
Thanks for the well wishes. I didn't mention the lighting in my original post, but you are right- that lighting sucked!!! The old man in there said he noted it on his report that goes to AWS so I was considering bringing that up if I do end up failing that portion.
The preparatiom for the Practical portion was not enough, in my opinion. As you took the same seminar as I did, I'm certain that our instructer did the best he could- he was obviously very conscientous about doing his job well. From what I've heard the practical portion has gone through some changes over the last few months, so I'm assuming that the instructors have not caught up to the new testing criteria.
Mostly I felt as though this portion was extremely limitted on time. The weldments required a lot of attention that sucked up a lot of time, but in the end I still had a few minutes left. But there was a decent amount of time during the test that I was panicing about how much time I had left, so that probably played a part in how I answered some questions.
Good luck to you too, and everybody else who is awaiting results or their test day.
Tony