Round up or down

[liz.concepcion.arch]

I have come across with questions that ask to round to the nearest dollar but in given cases there is additional information in the questions that suggest to round down.

For example if a question asks to calculate cost per sqft based on a given budget, but that you have to stay within budget. Let’s say you have a construction budget of $725,000 and a 10,000sqft facility. Your construction cost would be $72.50 per sqft so if you round to $73.00 you would be over budget by $5,000. So far I have noticed that in similar questions the answer always rounds up. Should we asume that when a question specifically asks to round to the nearest dollar we would need to round-up?

[coachdarionziegler]

Hi @liz.concepcion.arch ,

In the situation you’ve described you would need to round down so as not to exceed the budget. It always depends on the situation as to whether you round up or down - in this question the maximum budget is the key that you need to round down instead of up.

Questions about rounding get asked a lot. Check out these other posts regarding rounding and in what situations you round up/down!

Round up or down?

hi any clarification on the round up or down if the occupant is an odd number, how does the plumbing count work, say 43 overall, how do you divide man/women there is one question in PA exam 3, how do you round up or down in this case, any logic basically asking about parking spaces. from the material, it said that the required numbered of spaces is 43. Because 50% is the minimum for standard size spaces, 21 can be compact car spaces. for plumbing , if the calc is 20.1 water closet , do we use…

Element count, round up or down?

Great, thank you!

Occupant Load round up or down

Hi @najia.hashim , This is a tricky area! No worries! In your first exam you would round up to the nearest full occupant (because you can’t cut occupants in half). This is rounding to the most stringent value (in the eyes of the code) because you have to account for exit widths of one more full person. You must round up for plumbing fixture counts as you’ve described. And I think you were correct in both of your assessments, there was just some confusion about what was most stringent as far …

A Calucalation question

Hi @ranbebexuan , Let me see if I can help! I’ve pasted a portion of NCARB’s blog post doing a deep dive into question types below: [image] Quantitative fill in the blank questions on the exam will specify the units. Unless there are cues in the question about what unit to round too, I wouldn’t round the response. In your example I would answer 9.2. At the same time, if you’ve gotten a wacky number and the prompt doesn’t ask you to round, you might want to reevaluate your calculation. This…

Hope this helps!
-Darion

[liz.concepcion.arch]

Thats what I though, but I got the question wrong. I’m specifically referring to question #74 of FORM 3 from the Black Spectacles practice exam. The question says “assuming the project is on budget” as you mentioned I assumed that to stay on budget was the key but the “correct answer” was rounding-up. Not sure if its a test error or I miss understood the question.

Thanks for the other post they helped a lot!

[coachdarionziegler]

Hi @liz.concepcion.arch ,

Glad the links were helpful! We will double check that exam question to make sure its up to snuff and I’m not missing any context here.

@coachchrishopstock can you please take a look into this question? It’s on PA form 3.

Thanks,
-Darion

[coachchrishopstock]

Hi @liz.concepcion.arch thanks for the question!
For this question, I’d use typical rounding since the question simply says to ‘round to the nearest whole number’. We will, however, adjust the correct answer so that rounding down also is accepted as correct. I can understand why you’d round down in this situation and I agree that you have an understanding of the concepts being tested, therefore your answer should be correct.
Good luck in the rest of your studies and thanks for posting in the community!