CE pass - thoughts (very laggy Case Studies)
I just passed my first attempt at the CE exam. Came off failing PDD last month and wanted to bounce back in the meantime while waiting for the 2 month rollover.
Overall I was quite surprised at how difficult it felt. I was more confident going in than right before submitting the exam for scoring - the PPI and Black Spectacles (two main study resources along with the Ballast book) practice exams were relevant and definitely useful, but lacking in a couple key areas. And most frustrating was slogging through the case studies with overly detailed, heavy PDF drawing files that Prometric struggled to load. More on that later, but I was genuinely afraid of crashing the testing program while navigating those documents.
One thing I felt unprepared for was construction field analysis and figuring out some detailing/assembly standards. I had a good number of questions presenting a photo and asking how the Architect should respond with answers that didn't feel completely right or differentiated enough. This is a given by now, but the ARE really loves to lean into the "most correct" response so many of the answers could be reasonable and none were really perfect. Probably a good reflection of the realities of the profession but not great as a testing metric in my opinion. The PPI and Black Spectacles exams didn't include many field photo questions and the answers were a little bit more discrete.
I also feel the way Black Spectacles phrases questions and presents answers is too... cheeky? Sometimes answers are blatantly wrong and extraneous info is clearly thrown in to trip someone up. The ARE exam is a little more nuanced in this regard - and in turn more difficult overall. I may have gotten a false sense of preparedness from Black Spectacles, but again it's a good resource to have and the video series is great with including a real project side series for a literal teaching example.
So the Case Studies... much, much more involving than any of the previous ones I've experienced, in large part to the extremely clunky document display. Buffering the documents was slow and caused the entire program to lag. The display window is too small and requires a lot of scrolling back and forth (again, slow and laggy). The general question topics required a lot of back and forth checking of drawings and specifications and I was left hapless with a couple, unable to find the information after flipping back countless time. I really hope the new testing platform fixes some of these software issues - and that eventually NCARB pares down some of the resources to the essentials instead of overloading them.
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Thank you Nicholas for sharing your experience. I'm taking CE in two days and I'm especially worried about the site/field analysis questions. I recently passed PcM and PjM so feel pretty confident about the contracts, bidding procedures etc. I've been studying some detail drawings but real life photos are a little challenging because I don't always know how things are supposed to look in photos. Do you have any last minute words of wisdom to cover that area? And what do you think the percentage of those questions were in the exam?
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I agree with OP. The case studies actually did crash my exam, three times from the amount of additional data. My exam time ended up being 45 minutes over the allowed time due to technical errors. The drawings are difficult to read so you have to zoom in which makes it difficult to quickly compare necessary information. I ended up running out of time altogether on the case analysis portion, not being able to answer a few. I left over an hour to complete these.
The rest of the exam was as predicted, and I felt the ARE practice exam was a good indication of those questions. The case study was much harder and as I said - involved.
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I had the same experience as Nick Johnson! Study material didn't reflect exam questions for a good part of the exam. The worst part though was how long it took to load the resources for the Case Studies. It took a very long time to load them and to scroll through them which is required to get the information. I was concerned it would crash as I got the wheel of death a couple of times and then it finally did crash. It looks to have stopped the clock around when it crashed and kept my responses, but I have no idea how much time it burned waiting for resources to load and the stress and distraction it caused. I assumed it was the Testing center as it's old and outdated along with the technology but after doing some research it appears to be a wider exam problem. Waiting on results but don't feel good due to the Case Study issues..
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This is a PSI problem, so it will never be solved unless NCARB somehow requires them to get new computers (exam fees go up and fewer available spots) or they remove the large documents (defeats the purpose of the exam).
I also had a very laggy experience navigating the construction drawings, although my exam never crashed, the computer got very slow and loud and I was worried it would.
Overall I felt I had a bad CE exam. I didn't feel it matched up to what I studied, or the practice exam. I've done years of CA and I felt very prepared going in. I counted, and I only had two detail oriented hot spot questions, and zero site photo questions. I never got a question that asked "is this an RFI or something else?"
My entire exam was "what should the owner do if..." I felt I was prepared for these, but when they are asking the same question 50 times it led to a lot of second guessing. I ended up failing with about 59% score.
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