reflections

You need a 170 out of 200 to pass, and I would have been totally cool with any number in between.I took an hour to go through all the questions once. I spent the next half hour going over my marked questions. Then I spent an agonizing 10 -15 minutes on the 4 questions I really had no clue about. Then a quick sweep through again to make sure I didn’t make any huge mistakes.

Here’s my post-exam advice:

1. Be really nice to the testing person and if you can chose a busy testing site, do that. If they like you or are not paying attention then you milk more time out of the beginning part to write down your ‘brain dump’. I got about 3 minutes just sitting in front of screen asking me if I was indeed me. Then it says ‘you have run out of time’, you click next to start the tutorial (which you don’t need to do). You get 10 minutes during the tutorial. The only important tool to remember from the tutorial is that you can mark questions to come back review later – very useful. Then you get another couple minutes if you wait at the screen where you are supposed to press start. I had just about enough time to write all my primary and secondary info from my brain dump. I filled in a bunch of the tertiary stuff as I went along.

2. DEFINITELY DO THE BRAIN DUMP. If you’re considering not doing it, reconsider. The most helpful for me was my WIMSEE extended chart and my standards lists. It was great; on those questions I didn’t have to waste time thinking. I just referenced my brain dump, and I was good to go.

3. Green Building Educational Services (greenexamprep.com) was pretty spot on with their sample tests. The real ones were maybe a little harder, but I think it was also because they were just ones I hadn’t seen before.

4. Use the questions. One question can often give you a tip to the answer on another question, either by pointing out something you forgot or by eliminating a possibility. Continue taking notes on your brain dump when you run across something you forgot. There’s plenty of time.

Ok, now things to watch out for:

- LOTS of questions about water use
- LOTS of questions about CIR’s (repetitive ones actually… so maybe I just got a weird pool)
- plenty of little word tricks – (example: a question asking about mitigation strategies for “soil erosion impacts” could easily have been read as strategies to prevent erosion)
- several questions on the general goals and principles of green building which caught me off guard a bit
- a random question quizzing my knowledge of U-values, R-values, and other units of measurement not directly mentioned in credit requirements, but discussed in manual
- one too many questions about SS 8: Lighting Pollution, which I think I got wrong.
- a couple more on daylighting, which I think I also got wrong.
- submittal documentation was super important

IF I COULD GO BACK AND DO IT AGAIN (ha!):

- I would spend way more time scouring the submittal templates for each credit.

- I would still not spend any time thinking about Decision Makers (which I basically completely ignored in my studying). I only had one question about it and I inferred… correctly I think.

- I would have more of my mnemonics and memory strategies from the tertiary level committed to memory. And I would perhaps use images more; that worked really well.

- I would DEFINITELY keep some way of brain dumping the following three important lists:
❶ standards
❷ WIMSEE extended
❸ id thresholds (which I filled in when I did my secondary list, and a bit more during the test)

Hope this helps someone! If anyone else has post-exam advice or reflections, please leave a comment.

-Mariana Pickering
LEED AP (whoohoo!)