Practice Exam Question Re: Substitution
I'm finding that a lot of the CE questions are ambiguously worded and unclear. Here's a gem of a question from a recent practice exam:
A contractor prepares a concrete materials submittal that includes cementitious materials and aggregates, curing materials, floor and slab treatments, reinforcement accessories, an air-entraining admixture, and a floor sealer that is a substitution for the specified sealer. The architect approves the submittal without exception.
During installation of the tile flooring, it is discovered that the specified floortile adhesive is incompatible with the substituted floor sealer. A compatible adhesive is ordered, which requires extra time to deliver, and the general contractor submits a claim for a time extension and the extra costs.
How should this claim be resolved?
A.The architect should accept the claim because the submittal was approved.
B.The general contractor is responsible for extra costs and time delays.
C.The tile subcontractor must supply a compatible adhesive at their own cost.
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The correct answer is B, and I got it correct because I just guessed that the GC should be responsible for ensuring that any substitutions for materials should be compatible with other materials in the project (i.e. Means and Methods).
But I take exception with how this question explanation is written and explained to be a question about how substitutions should be fed through with a specific review/approval procedure. Here's the official explanation:
CORRECT RESPONSE
The general contractor is responsible for extra costs and time delays.
There are specific processes for requesting substitutions, and burying them within other submittals is not appropriate. A substitution request made during the bid process must be carefully reviewed to avoid problematic outcomes.
Can someone explain how one would logically solve this problem based on the information given? If provided that NCARB's explanation regarding the substitution procedure is, indeed the correct way to evaluate this problem, how is one supposed to deduce this answer?
Thanks in advance.
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The contractor holds responsibility for means and methods of construction….the architect only approves submittals to confirm design intent and is not responsible for detailed review…the contractor is committed to designing exactly what is in the contract (or else she would make up a low-bid-to-win-the-job with cheaper substitutions)….and substitutions have their own formal process (to prevent this bait-and-switch)….memorizing all of these rules about who is responsible for what is difficult because the rules seem arbitrary…but they are NOT arbitrary at ALL if you own the reasoning behind them….they’re a bit self-defeating and assume the darkest of human behavior and promote adversarial working relationships to the point of inefficiency…but they have a solid reasoning behind them….if you watch the following video I made last year for Amber Book, I promise that these things will become clear!
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The way I read it, the issue is that there is no reason to assume that the substitution process was not properly followed. The explanation makes it sounds like its abundantly clear this is the first the architect has seen this substitution. But the first time I read it, my assumption was that the substituted material was substituted following the proper steps. Even after seeing the explanation, I still don't see any way the test taker could even reasonably infer that the substitution process wasn't followed.
I think there are plenty of examples of test-takers not liking questions simply because they can't figure out it. This seems like a legitimate case of a bad question.
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Had the contractor asked to substitute a wood floor, replacing the as-designed concrete floor, and had that wood floor been now subject to rot because of moisture emanating from the crawlspace below it, THEN it might be the architect's fault because that swap changed the design intent for the worse and the contractor cannot be expected to calculate the moisture flow rate in the crawlspace from the soil. . . But because the contractor is responsible for means and methods of construction, and because the architect is only responsible for approving that the submittal/substitution meets the broad design intent, this problem is on the contractor. For the sake of the building construction schedule, we can't have architect's researching the chemical interaction of sealers when everyone on the site is waiting to proceed with construction. . . and because the contractor may have a perfectly good reason to go with one concrete sealer over the other (shorter lead time, one particular sealer is more difficult to apply, there will be cost savings to be passed onto the owner, there's a better warranty, etc) the owner and contractor don't want something as routine as swapping one sealer for another to be a big thing. The architect chose a system of finishes she believed to be compatible (often because she used that combination of concrete sealer and tile before without problems; or because she specified Bostik concrete sealer and Bostik tile grout assuming that one company would not make two products that don't work together). . .if the contractor wants to leave that Bostik ecosystem for one of the building products made by another reputable manufacturer (say, PPG) because it rolls on more easily in a humid environment, great. . . That's the kind of discretion we want contractors to have. . . but if the contractor takes a reasonable calculated risk by swapping sealers to speed up construction and the swapped sealer didn't alter the design intent but the reasonable calculated risk taken didn't pay off and now construction has been slowed down for the swap that was supposed to speed it up, that's 100% on the contractor to swallow the downstream knock-on effects.
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That's all fine and good, but that's not at all what the explanation is saying is the problem. I agree that I probably would have gone with the GC as my answer, but not for the reason they are saying.
If they are trying to assess whether or not the test-taker understands the substitution process, then this question is a horrible assessment for that. Its bizarre that they thought this was an appropriate explanation for the solution based on the information given.
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Michael Ermann, I appreciate your thoroughness of your explanation (even though it seems to stray somewhat from the actual question being asked) but let's be real: would you go through that level of reasoning to answer this question on an exam? If so, that's an incredible amount of time you just spent trying to work out the scenarios to answer the question. I agree w Matthew that the reasoning that was given does not correlate with the question being asked and the concurrent information being presented to supposedly answer the question. Let's call a spade a spade and recognize that a piss poor question/answer is just that. I've seen a lot of these kinds of questions on these exams and it's rather confusing to see how they even made it on to the exam/practice exam to begin with.
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This question is a bit wonky and the explanation seems haphazard - the 2nd sentence about substitution requests during the bidding phase doesn't really fit the question because this type of a submittal wouldn't be submitted during the bidding phase.
That said, when reading this question, you're presented with a huge list of things that the GC submitted to the architect - all seem normal, then they slipped in a substitution request. That's a red flag and on the ARE, the GC is going to be wrong for doing that every single time. Submittals are for the sole purpose of showing the architect how the GC proposes to comply with the CDs - a substitution request certainly doesn't fall into that category (A201 3.12.14).
Even if the architect missed it and approved the submittal, they're not in the wrong, the GC is, because they didn't follow the substitution request protocol, and because of the numerous disclaimers about what the architect's approval means noted in AIA A201, 4.2.7.
It's super easy to read too far into a question like this - In real life, I'd have all sorts of questions about this scenario. Did the tile installer walk the jobsite before signing a contract? If they did and the sealer was installed, they likely accepted the surface preparation as part of their contract, and C could be correct (in real life). But the question doesn't say any of that, so when taking the ARE we need to avoid the very line of reasoning that we use in practice.
To summarize - I would read this question, realize the red flag that the GC committed, and choose GC as the correct answer and move on. Hopefully I only spent 20-30 seconds on this, and can use the extra time on the case studies or a different question.
Chris Hopstock RA
Black Spectacles
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