PDD - review (awaiting score)
Just finished first round at PDD! Hopefully the only round and scores come back soon. Thought it was an interesting test and not at all what I expected. I studied a lot of in depth plumbing, electrical, details, materials, etc. It was wayyyy more broad than I expected and pulled in some small detail items. The math was very common sense mixed with strategic solving. Overall I felt confident but you never know! I'm hoping this is my only round after devoting such drastic hours to prepping for it. Good luck! (And take the test so I can get my score) ☺️
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I was definitely not a fan. I'm used to doing lots of sketches and visualizations as well as writing out math problems in a certain way. It took some adjusting to get used to doing it on the screen.
Even with the reduced problems, it took me the full test period - which I correlate with the time it took to draw/type.
Another note, my test froze up 3 times. Always when zooming into the drawing references. Luckily Prometric knew how to restart it each time without losing my answers. I felt bad for testers around me trying to focus
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Thank you for providing that review of the whiteboard. I was going to post a new comment but saw your post. I tried using the whiteboard while taking a blackspectacles practice exam and was not impressed. I found it to be clunky and not very user friendly, especially trying to using during a timed exam. I like to write things out on paper that I would like to remember during a question or use it to make notes during a calculation question. Good to hear that are not that many calculation questions on this exam. I had to make sure I didn't try to use any scratch paper so I could get use to using the whiteboard. Hopefully NCARB will change their minds and give people the scratch paper back but doubtful...
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I just took PDD as well yesterday, and I can confirm that calculations and structural questions were minimal, at least on my version of the exam. I think I used the white board about 5 times. The test is definitely broad in scope, with some really detailed questions as well. PDD is possibly slightly easier than PPD...at least not as many code questions and a lot more details to look at.
From reading the posts here, I would guess that the different exam versions vary quite a bit.
I was able to complete the exam with about 20 min left to review my marked questions, changing a few answers after I had a second review of the question.
Leaving prometric I felt pretty confident, so just waiting on the scores to come out now (I am also waiting for my PPD score as well !).
Good luck to everyone studying...
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I also took PDD yesterday. This was my last exam and I'm hoping for a pass so I can finally be done!
I can definitely echo Andrew & Aspen's posts. I felt this exam was much simpler than PPD, I ran through all of the questions pretty quickly which almost makes me feel like I was missing something. All in all, I felt it to be much more straight forward than PPD. Most of my work experience is with creating CD's and I felt my work experience was crucial to (hopefully) passing this exam. I also disagree that there is a lot of overlap between PPD & PDD, it's helpful to take them in succession but the topics and scope are vastly different.
The whiteboard was horrific, and my exam crashed twice which seemed to be due to the zooming of the large drawing files included in the case studies. I hope for everyone taking these exams in the future that the whiteboard is rolled back and they bring back scratch paper, it was extremely difficult to draw or visualize anything.
Good luck everyone!
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