SPD Pass

Site Grading & Site Design Vignettes and Multiple Choice

SPD Pass

Postby guiggster » Sat Oct 21, 2017 8:19 am

Passed the SPD and am finally finished with the AREs. I will pass along advice that I was given 6 years ago: "Finish your exams before you have kids." Six years ago that seemed like unneeded advice, but a new job, new city, new house, and two kids and 6 years later, well...life finds a way.

I thought I'd say a couple things here, because I find these posts particularly useful, and I owe it to the forum to give back in whatever small way I can:

VIGNETTES:
The SPD vignettes were remarkably similar to the NCARB practice vignettes. Maybe a few more constraints, but very straight forward with little room for interpretation. I finished both vignettes and reviewed multiple times with an hour to spare. It's important that you look for Coach and Sparky83's comments on past vignettes. I didn't really get responses to the vignettes I posted here, but I assumed that meant that they were mostly correct and that my questions could be found in past threads. Using Google's "site:arecoach.com [search term]" search function is key, as the forum's search function is useless at this point.

MULTIPLE CHOICE:
The multiple choice wasn't so much "WTF" as others have stated; it just did not focus that much on the bulk of what is in the study material. I was surprised at how much PPP content there was. If you have a good handle on zoning and the concept of variances, you would have aced 10% of the questions off the bat. The difficulty of this test was that, more so than the other AREs, there seemed to be a ton of questions that followed the "Pick the best option" format. This generally meant that I would get to two answers that seemed totally appropriate for the question and had to roll the dice on which of the two was right.

STUDY MATERIALS:
The usual stuff that's suggested on this forum:
Ballast + practice test
Archiflash 3.1 flashcards
Skimmed Kaplan + practice test
Jenny's notes
Caroline's notes
Vignette Alts
Lighting and CPTED section of Russ' Site Planning Handbook

Some other links that were useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Az05_jzgNw . LIGHTING TYPES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_pre ... nvironment . CPTED
https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines ... g-elements SITE ADA
https://clu-in.org/products/citguide/ EPA SITE CLEANUP TECHNOLOGIES
guiggster
 
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