Passed all on first try with Amber Book!
Just wanted to share how helpful I found the Amber Book in preparing for these tests in case it helps anyone else in their journey.
A little background - I had been out of the field for 7 years raising kids so I was super intimidated by the prospect of taking the exams, but getting licensed has been important to me ever since starting architecture school, so I decided to give it a go. After talking with friends and doing a little research I chose to start with Amber Book and then see what other materials I might need to supplement with as I got oriented. It turned out that all I needed was Amber Book! It took me a while to work my way through it, but I found their way of presenting the material really stuck with me and was enough to get me decent scores on the practice tests, so I just kept going. After 6 months I am done! On top of helping me over this hurdle, the material they presented was a great refresher that now makes me feel more confident about easing back into practice. They took a task that seemed intimidating and insurmountable and broke it down into a process that was approachable and even enjoyable a lot of the time. In addition to the great content they also provided great support when I had trouble or psyched myself out. I'm so grateful - I think that the whole thing would have been a much harder ordeal without them.
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Congrats on your amazing achievement!!!
I am also planning on preparing using Amber Book. I wanted to ask you how long did it take you to study the entire material until you started the the first exam? Did you take them in order? How far apart did you schedule the exams?
Thanks, Andrei
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Congratulations!!! I would like to know too. Been studying Amber Book since May this year and when I took the CE exam back in September I failed. So now I’m taking Elif’s practice exams and planning on taking WeARE, but also still go back and forth to Amber Book. It’s great but just thought it wasn’t enough to pass.
Thanks - Sarah!
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Hey! Sorry that I didn't address these questions in my original post - definitely super relevant information. Here's what I did (with the caveat that it's not what the AB folks advise, which I also think would work really well, it just had to be adapted to my life). So I based my studying on the study priority matrix from AB and started out by going through the Pro Practice material. It took me a couple of months to go through the Pro Practice, Site, and Codes materials, then I took PcM on 4/18, PjM on 5/6, and CE on 5/16. Then I took a long break due to the switchover to PSI, followed by kids out of school, followed by covid, and finally got back to working though the Systems and Codes material in September. I took PA on 10/24 and then PPD on 11/12 and PDD on 11/17. That long break really made my task a lot harder than it would have been otherwise, because I had to go back and review a lot to refresh my memory. I think that the AB advice to study for the tests all at once and then take them all together is pretty good, although I don’t think that I could manage to take more than one per week – they’re pretty draining. My biggest piece of advice for using AB successfully is to really dig into the flash cards – there is a TON of content and supplementary material there that takes a lot of extra time to work through but is really helpful. Best of luck!
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