Tested Today - Commentary and Concerns!

[yadinami]

So, I tested at noon today.. two things:

1) Not sure if anyone else has experienced this with 5.0 glitches, but two questions on my exam were repeated. Meaning I answered two questions twice.. Super interested to see if this will matter, but I'm more concerned about potentially having four wrong answers (!) and if I should bother letting NCARB know about this. I doubt they'll be surprised or care very much, but it's kind of confusing.

2) There was a word spelled incorrectly in another question.. and now I'm just paranoid about trusting the accuracy of anything with these exams!

In other news:

Overall, this seemed like a good mix of SPD/PPP and BS, but nothing totally surprised me (aside from the weird glitchy stuff). Immediately after both PPD and PDD exams, I've gone through my study materials to keep a brain dump of what I saw vs. what I studied. I can't say I was too far off for either, but I also don't know my results yet...

I did a thorough pass through Building Codes Illustrated and Building Construction Illustrated, my old SPD notes, and some NALSA flashcards. Both Ballast practice exams for these two exams were kinda brutal, but helpful in terms of getting a general idea of content coverage. From what I can remember (I took PDD about two weeks ago), Building Construction Illustrated was more helpful for PDD and Codes Illustrated was much better for PPD. I agree with basically everything VanillaBuns said in her recap of the exam contents.

Anyway, while I wait for results.. Anyone else had this problem with repeated questions and typos?

[nickp1085]

I noticed a few hot spot questions repeated with the same solar orientation diagrams but slight change in the question referring to a different city the diagram may be in.

However, I have had a bigger issue with 5.0 that I too am debating writing to NCARB about. Maybe this is just my feeling but I have taken PPD and PDD and I felt that quite a few questions definitely did not have enough material in the question in order to give an answer. The problem is of course that we can not document anything from the test nor do we find out what questions we got wrong/right and if I were to describe any specific questions to them, it would be based on a memory only.

[ptzumd]

I also had a hotspot question repeated on either PPD or PDD. I think there may have been a slight difference between the two, but they were essentially the same. I also had a question on PDD that I had seen on the CDCS exam I took a year earlier. Along the same lines as Nick, I too thought there was missing information in some of the case study questions. If it was not missing, it was far too hard to find, in my opinion.

I would recommend contacting NCARB with any comments you have that could improve the test for future testers. There is no downside for you to spend a few minutes writing an e-mail, and there is a huge potential upside for the future of the test, and possibly even your test. While it should not be our job as testers to be the ones to be doing QC on the exam, I don't think we should just let errors and oversights like this slip by without saying anything. I e-mailed NCARB after both PPD and PDD with my concerns about the exam.