Time spent in prep for CE
I was wondering, It seem like there is a lot of overlap in material between PjM and CE, how much time are people spending for CE to study after passing both PcM and PjM? It almost feels like because there is so much overlap that I could almost take the CE exam not long after I passed my PjM recently? It seems like its a lot of contracts knowledge again such as "who is at fault if this happens" and "who's responsibility is this" questions and whatnot, just with some specific construction details knowledge?
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Hi Fry,
About half to 2/3 of questions on CE are mostly about the administration of the contracts for construction that are much of the focus of PjM.
The other half of questions (about 30-35 of them) will be technical content questions about building construction and site visits that pull from almost the full scope of topics that can show up on PPD and PDD - that's about 30 questions that are assembled from a subset of 1000 technical topics - everything from door clearances to flashing details to soil boring logs.
The challenge of CE is that it's a lot easier to pass if you have a decent understanding of the technical topics. There are way less Pro Practice topics (maybe 100?) to know to have a good chance of doing well on the 35-45 Pro Pracitce questions, but you likely won't get enough of those correct to achieve a passing score without getting at least 30-40% of the technical questions correct - and you'll need to study basically all of those technical topics for PPD/PDD.
A lot of people do take CE shortly after PjM because there is so much overlap - I haven't seen sequencing pass-rate data from NCARB (how likely were people to pass CE taking it after PjM vs after PDD), but I'd expect from a time-efficiency perspective, it's quicker to refresh on the Contracts topics after studying all the technical topics for PPD/PDD to be ready to take CE than it is to study enough technical material to get 30-40% of those questions correct and then repeat that study for PPD/PDD.
At the same time, spending time you could be using to study thinking about exam order is definitely less time efficient than spending that time studying to take your next exam!
TLDR: 150? hours minimum, probably, for most people, if you passed PjM and PcM first time to get to know enough of the Technical topics to have a reasonable likelihood of answering enough of those questions correctly have a reasonable likelihood of passing CE - unless you happen to be a whiz at the technical stuff. If you have an intuitive understanding of a lot of the technical topics, then it's definitely possible to pass CE with way less time - you could refresh your Pro Practice topics in a week and probably be fine.
Best,
Ralph, the Amber Book Team -
Hi Claurak,
CE is almost certainly easier to pass once you've passed the technical exams, yes, but it's definitely possible to pass before taking them - you will just end up reviewing flashing and ADA clearances and all that kind of thing again especially for PPD and PDD. It takes a lot less time to review the narrow range of Pro Practice topics that will absolutely show up on CE than it does to learn for the first time the hundreds of technical topics that might show up - you'll see about 30 Qs from the technical pool, but there are far more topics that could be tested on than you'll ever actually see.
Best,
Ralph, the Amber Book Team
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