ARE exam ended 10 minutes prematurely!
Today I took my first ARE, the PA exam. A few curious things happened.
The exam timer supposedly letting me know how much time is left had not finished expiring when the exam quit on me, telling me that I've reached the allotted time to complete the exam. I had exactly 10 minutes left on the clock when this happened, and maybe about a dozen questions still left to go through that were unfortunately left unanswered because of this.
When this happened, it took the remaining time to ask me questions about how much time I spent studying, what I thought about the exam questions, etc.
Is this normal? Did anyone else experience this? This is a significant issue if the countdown is telling you that you have 10 more minutes than you actually have, surely this is not by design? I don't recall any instruction or message in the beginning notifying me that the exam would end 10 minutes early to ask me non-exam-related questions.
What may be a related issue: in the same exam, the break time I was given was 25 minutes. I was expecting to be allotted 15 minutes break since that's what the Black Spectacles practice exams have been giving me. Could this 10-minute discrepancy be related to the 10-minute premature ending of my exam?
The Prometric testing center is #5365 in Falls Church Virginia, if that matters. I don't know if Prometric has the means to verify what I experienced.
-
Hey Benjamin,
It sounds like you potentially had a technical issue with your exam. The pop-up message should not appear until all time within the testing window is gone. Once the pop-up warning appears, the clock begins counting down for the next section of the exam (closeout screens). This time will display before proceeding to the closing screens assuming your time is up for answering questions.
I recommend contacting NCARB Customer Service and reporting the technical issue as soon as possible.
Regarding breaks, NCARB has extended the flexible break time for all divisions from 15 minutes to 25 minutes to account for longer check-in procedures at Prometric. Check out page 2 of the ARE 5.0 Guidelines for more information - https://www.ncarb.org/sites/default/files/ARE-5-Guidelines.pdf. This has no impact on the testing time provided for the question portion of the PA exam (3 hours 15 minutes).
Hope this helps.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
1 comment