The only thing keeping me going is that I am near the end of this nightmare and I passed the other test fairly easily, but I cant get past the PDD exam. I keep failing the construction documentation portion every time. Worse thing is the Construction documentation portion seems to be the area that nationally people do the best on. I tried a different set of study material and failed all but one of the divisions this time the worse I had done yet. I need help and I am not sure where to start.
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Hi @rpresto3 !
Thanks for your post and I apologize that you’ve had such trouble with PDD. It can be really frustrating. Personally, PDD was the toughest one for me to pass as well and it was the last exam I had to pass for my license.
For me, I do best when I take as many practice tests as possible. After taking the practice test, I go through every answer and research in the resource that the answer is from. I then study every term that was an option in the exam answers so I make sure I understand every term and where to apply them. It’s fairly time consuming but it really does help you to learn any terms you might not know.
I also heavily relied on NCARB’s ARE Community. If you go to the PDD division and sort comments by likes, the top comments are people who have passed and list the resources and sections of those resources that they studied from. This is really helpful, and helps narrow down the resource content since it can be overwhelming just digging through the large resources that NCARB lists.
Another strategy I used specifically for the CD portion of PDD was to just look through CD sets at the office where I was working. This helped me familiarize myself with the different divisions and what was expected to be shown in each division as well as the order of drawings and content and level of detail expected to be present in the CDs.
I hope this helps and I hope other Community members feel free to post about what worked for them. Good luck!
-Rebecca
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