Hello,
I was wondering why the correct answer to the question is candidate a, my answer is candidate c because it mentioned that he/she is a bim expert, although his healthcare experience is only 70% instead of 75% per the requirements. It’s not mentioned that candidate a is bim proficient which is a requirement of the position. Comparing between candidate a and candidate b, it seems to me that candidate c is more qualified. Can you please explain? Thank you.
Marilou Denum
Hi @marilou.denum - we added a sentence to the question about a week ago that I think helps clarify, not sure if you took the exam before or after I added it.
The question states that ‘All four have shared their portfolios, which included projects completed using BIM’. The question notes that the firm is looking for a candidate who’s BIM proficient, not necessarily an expert. Since all four candidates can be considered to be BIM proficient based on them all having portfolios with BIM projects, the other factors must be considered. Candidate A is the only candidate that meets all of the firm’s criteria. Candidate C’s experience in healthcare, at 70%, is short of the firm’s 75% requirement.
I hope this was helpful and good luck on your next exam!
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your reply. I missed that sentence on the question.
No problem! FYI that sentence is purposely added after the bullets in the question, making it easy to miss. It’s really important to practice reading the whole question, determining what information is important (perhaps by highlighting) and then answering the question.
I did read the sentence at the end about their portfolios which include “projects completed in BIM”. But I disagree this is an adequate sentence to relay enough information. As depending on the candidate in questions role on the project, the size and structure of firm they worked at, and other unknown factors it still seems like it is lacking critical information on whether or not the candidate is actually “proficient” in BIM. (i.e. the candidate could have done schematic design by hand/redlined by hand/selected furnishings etc., while another staff member managed the BIM model, but they still included it in their portfolio, which IS a common scenario in the real world.)
While I understand many of the questions are built to throw test takers off and have you look deep for information, just adding on a sentence that wasn’t a part of the original question structure feels like a very lazy solution and does not increase the integrity of the exam in my opinion, especially considering the beginning of the question says “refer to the exhibit.” I am finding many of these questions that have been revised are creating in a “gotcha” formula, which is proven by educational research to decrease understanding. It feels that if people are paying good money for the study materials the time should be put into restructuring questions the thorough way.
Hi @afish - thanks for replying! We hear frustration like this from time to time about our exam questions and it’s important to remember that our questions are designed to prepare candidates for the actual ARE - therefore, they have to match the style, format, level of complexity, etc. of NCARB’s questions. We’d be doing our customers a disservice if our practice exams weren’t designed to reflect the style of the actual ARE - but occasionally that leads to feedback like this.
Questions on the ARE are generally designed to fit on a screen without much, if any, scrolling (case studies are an obvious outlier to what I am saying here). As architects, we’re used to researching questions, asking deeper questions, and gathering all sorts of information before making decisions - but on the ARE, you kind of need to take the information on the screen at face value and move on through the questions.
So, when a question says that a firm is looking for someone ‘proficient’ in BIM, and the question states that each candidate has BIM projects in their portfolio - I would take that to mean that each candidate is, in fact, proficient in BIM. Of course, in the real world, we’d want to know all of the information that you mentioned - how much of the model they actually created, what portions of the project they worked on, etc. But on the ARE, since that information is not provided, we can’t go down that line of thinking.
Regarding the ‘refer to the exhibit’ prompt - that’s a stylistic thing that NCARB has for any question with an exhibit, so we follow suit. It does not mean that information that’s not in the exhibit is less valuable than information within the exhibit, it simply is included so that you don’t miss the exhibit entirely. If it was up to us I probably wouldn’t include it but since NCARB does, we do.