PA: Strategy for Long Form Questions
Hello NCARB Community,
I was wondering if anyone had a good strategy for approaching the long-form questions on the Programming and Analysis exam. To be clear I'm not talking about the case studies. The type of questions I'm referring to are when you're given a list of design criteria and then you're asked to respond given a site plan, image/photograph, adjacency diagram, etc.
I recently took--and failed--PA for the first time and I really struggled with time management, which I know is a common issue with this exam. I was taken off guard as it felt like every other question was in this "mini" case study format. I'm a slow/careful reader, so when presented with SO many of these long questions I panicked and raced through easily a third of the questions in an attempt to simply finish the exam.
I've practiced using the Walking the ARE and Black Spectacles exams which were fine but I found they didn't have comparable questions types to what I'm describing and I had no timing issues taking these practice tests. I think Walking the ARE came the closest on their case study setup but I feel fairly confident in how I approach those questions already.
Any advice would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Meredith
-
Hi Meredith,
I have a same problem with you about time management. I recently found a website which has some really good strategy on this, especially on the case study. Hope that will help you. See the link below.
https://www.passtheare.com/are-5-0-time-strategy-and-guessing/
-
Thanks Pui! I hadn't seen this site before and read several of the blog posts, very useful. It's making me reconsider my time management overall, I think it's something I took for granted as I got through PcM, PjM, and CE without an issue. I guess everyone's right that the "technical" exams are another ball of wax.
Thanks again! Appreciate the help. Hoping it will be better in the next go around.
-
Hi Meredith,
Check out Marian Curac's YouTube video on tackling these types of questions. It's worth the hour time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzRi-1j2xac&t=5s
-
I relate so much to Meredith's struggles with the long form questions! I am preparing to take PA in a few weeks and just took NCARB's Programming & Analysis Practice Exam. This was the first division-specific NCARB practice test that I have taken. (The Demo Exam was the only one available when I was prepping for PcM, PjM, and CE). I was so surprised to see how many of these long form questions were in the discreet items! My time management strategies pretty much tanked compared to how they worked for me on the technical exams. Still, I am very glad to have become aware of the time management challenges for this division on a practice test rather than on the real thing!
If you are prepping for PA and have not yet taken NCARB's practice exam for this division, I would highly recommend allowing yourself time to do so (and to review the answers!) before taking your test. I'm also planning to take the new PA Practice Quiz by Amber Book, and hope to look through some of the resources shared in this post for practice navigating these longer questions too! Best of luck to all :)
-
Hey Zoe,
Would you mind sharing the % you got for the PA NCARB Practice? I took that yesterday and I'm not ready to the looooong questions....and I barely have 20 mins left for my case study. And I scored only 51%...
I did review the case study afterward, and actually, they are not hard.
Best,
Jay
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
7 comments