Mythbusting 6: If you pass an exam division, you didn’t necessarily do everything right 

You planned on having dinner on the table at 6:45 but you’re going to miss that deadline by one minute. Now what?

Nearly all my posts focus on content—building science, contracts, soils etc.—but once per quarter I dedicate a post to mythbusting. Yesterday, someone posted suggesting they made an error in their studying because they failed an exam. While often a failed exam is the result of an error, this one wasn’t.

I know that the person posting didn’t make an error in his studying because he barely missed passing. I’ve seen more fail reports than anybody (who doesn’t have an @ncarb.org email suffix)–I saw eight fail reports yesterday morning alone–and I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing how close someone came to passing. This poster came as close as I’ve seen to a passing score–he almost certainly missed passing by just one question. . . but he was doubting everything he did to prepare for the exam and tapping the community to lay out a new study regime for the retake.

Have you seen the 2008 movie Slumdog Millionaire where the boy from the Joho slums of Mumai goes on a quizshow and answers all of the questions correctly because they happen to align with his lived experience? If you took an exam division 100,000 times you surely wouldn’t get the same score every time–your score would distribute across some sort of normal “bell” curve symmetrically around a mean. Sometimes you’d get a Slumdog collection of questions that happen to align with your experience designing small stick-framed buildings and your score would land above the mean, and other times you’ll happen to come across test items focused on the large concrete and steel buildings that you haven’t yet seen in your career and your score will suffer somewhere below the mean. Your goal isn’t to pass this one test. . . it’s to get your mean high enough that you’re likely to get licensed as quickly and efficiently as possible.

It happens the other way around too. When you pass an exam, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you did everything right–you may have eeked out the pass by one question! You just don’t know because no “pass report” arrives on your screen to suggest by how much you passed the exam division. Frankly, I wouldn’t have expected to have to write a mythbusting post about this. It seems rather obvious that when you have a continuum (the possible scores you might earn on an exam division) and the necessity of a binary pass/fail gate (the cut score your score must exceed to pass) . . . it seems rather obvious that you may have studied poorly but barely passed this time and studied effectively but didn’t pass the next time. Yet, I’m surprised how often folks are surprised when I bring up this concept.

Of course, nothing bad (usually) happens when dinner arrives one minute late. Most things in life we experience within a continuum, and we recognize them as such. Then every once and a while you’ll arrive to catch a train one minute late and the continuum becomes a binary event: either you make it on the train or you miss the train. My advice: get yourself in a position to probably make the train, and if you hit unusual traffic on the way to the station, patiently wait until the next train departs and hop on that one to arrive at your destination later. If your fail report suggests that you missed by a little bit, reschedule for as soon as possible and calmly engage a retake before you forget the content that got you close to a passing score on the first attempt.

I can’t wait for you to get licensed—Michael Ermann, Amber Book creator.