Passed in SoCal

Passed in SoCal

Postby ps1603 » Mon Feb 05, 2018 11:13 am

Just moved to Southern California. I am licensed in another state, and have had my own small architecture firm (me and one or two employees) for about 7 years, but my partner's work brought us to CA, so it's been a big transition for my career. I was DREADING the CSE, but I passed on my first try. I spent about a week gathering materials, and studied full-time for about three weeks (not really working at the moment). I only used TWE and the Chen practice test.

My takeaways:

TWE is a great overview, very well organized, and I will be keeping it as a reference source to use during practice, but my exam was much harder and the questions were very confusing (to me the Chen test was more similar to the real exam than the OMCES) - I think to be prepared you need to think in terms of a project scenario (what would you do??), even for the general exam questions. There was rarely a question with a simple definition or obvious answer. Most of my questions were to the effect of: "if you were in this scenario and x happened, how would you handle it?" with the scenario being something that was never cut and dried like you would often see in the practice exams, and then the multiple choice answers (each answer often had 5-6 terms or concepts within it) I could usually rule out two of the four, but for some reason there would almost always be two that almost seemed equally correct, so I had a really hard time with a few of them. I think I flagged about 20-25 for review and went back over them once I made it through the whole thing. I left the exam feeling like I might not have passed, but I did. To be honest, I'm not sure there is any way you can adequately prepare for it, as the difficulty isn't in the actual material, it has more to do with the way the questions are phrased. Using your own logic and reasoning are a huge part of being able to rule out answers and make the correct decision. This exam was harder than any of the ARE exams I took, by far!

FYI, I did NOT get my exam results the day of the exam, they were forwarded to me a few days later by someone at CAB - they said that sometimes technical difficulties arise and exam results aren't available on the day of the exam. Needless to say I was a nervous wreck for a few days. So if that happens to you, know it's not unheard of.
ps1603
 
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Re: Passed in SoCal

Postby gbalaka » Mon Feb 05, 2018 3:55 pm

That's weird that the score wasn't immediate.

And yes, the questions are answers on this exam were quite confusing.

But hey, a pass is a pass. Congratulations on your second license!
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