Found out I passed Building Systems this morning after taking it last Tuesday. I thought I failed after I left the exam because there were so many minute detail oriented questions that I had no clue about. For those of you trying to finish up 4.0 this is what I did:
BALLAST AND KAPLAN: I alternated reading Ballast and Kaplan over and over. No notes, just very mindful reading. There was a lot of stuff I saw for the first time while studying, so I basically had my phone in hand the whole time and googled everything that I didn't understand (which was actually most of it). Youtube is was essential. You really have to go back to high school science and chemistry to really understand what's going on, and I found understanding the reasons why something is the way it is helps better than memorizing. The study guides were good guides, I just needed to look a lot of things up.
AMBER SERIES: Nope. I'm not spending $400 on videos. I don't know about you guys but I'd rather spend $400 taking the exams twice without studying just to get a preview of the questions than $400 to be spoon-fed.
AMBER BOOK: I bought the book (really just a 60 question quiz with really good explanations) and that I thought helped me understand things better. Would recommend.
MEEB: Nope. Too big. I read one chapter which took half a day, had too much content, and was too detailed. There was a lot of stuff on my test I didn't know that I assumed was inside that book. If I failed, I would have combed through it because the study guides are basically this book in a summarized form. But I didn't so meh.
CALCS: I didn't study too many calculations except for U value stuff. I learned most of them just through reading without focusing on them since they're all usually some variant of A=B*C Acoustics was too confusing. Not wasting time re-memorizing the rules of logarithms so I can answer one or two questions that I'd probably get wrong anyway.
VIGNETTE: Vignette was straight forward. I had rounded all the inches to 0.5 feet which worked for the practice exam but I realized made the difference between needing 2 ducts or 3 ducts on my actual exam. Caught it at the last minute.