Finally Done with ARE's

I’ve been using this forum for a long time for study strategies and help study for my exams. Now that I have passed my last exam, I wanted to give back to this awesome community and outline my study strategies for anyone who may be looking for some help.

• The strategy that I found most helpful was to schedule an exam before starting to study. This gave me a deadline to work towards and to split my time amongst study resources appropriately.
• I studied about 4 weeks for each pro-practice exam and PA. PPD and PDD required more time for me – I studied for both together for about 5 weeks.
• PcM, PjM, CE - As countless posts before me have said, there is a lot of overlap between these three exams so it just makes sense to take these exams close to each other.
  • AHPP and Ballast were my two main resources for all three of these exams. I started with Ballast to get a general understanding of the concepts covered in the exam. Then I took the Ballast practice exam to see what concepts I needed more help on and used AHPP to reinforce my understanding of them.
  • Schiff Hardin lectures were vital for my understanding of contracts – he does a great job of applying real world scenarios to contract language which makes it much easier to understand – contracts will typically be covered in some fashion in all pro-practice exams
• PA, PPD, PDD
  • My main resource for these three exams was Amber Books. Michael Ermann does a great job condensing complicated concepts into digestible videos. The flashcards are also a must as they cover information not covered in the videos (sign up with the group link below for a discount). In my experience, Amber Books provided 70% of the information I needed for these exam. I supplemented the other 30% with Ballast, Architect's Studio Companion, and FEMA: Designing for Earthquakes (this document was crucial in understanding structure as it pertains to seismic). Again, the overlap between PA/PPD and PPD/PDD is too much not to study for these exams together. However, I didn’t take these tests together as recommended by Amber Books, but rather took these exams 5 weeks apart.

Hopefully this helps and good luck!

Amber Book Group Signup List: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HcxBJtfvB56_aU0Idk7BUqB5lukqmWMUyl6WEibV7mY/edit#gid=1171530059