architect54

I hope everybody had a Happy Thanksgiving.

I’ve had a bit of a shock, because people who know me have actually read my website. I should have been ready for this, since I mention this site in the signature of my personal email! Still, most everybody who knows me from the architecture realm ignores this site or even if they read it, they don’t mention it.

Imagine my dismay, when fellow business students mentioned the site to me in conversation. I knew at some point this might happen. (Duh.) I still wasn’t ready to promote myself or even discuss the content!

Because of this loss of anonymity and poor study habits my posts seem infrequent. Don’t worry I’m still studying and posting! So stick along for the ride.

An upcoming posts is about what’s happening in the office with others taking the Architectural Registration Exam.

Lastly, I got my results for Programming, Planning and Practice. I passed. OH YEAH!

My results are in for Construction Documents and Services. I got them in the mail two Saturdays ago. With the feelings from getting my results, it was pretty hard for me to put into words what I experienced, let alone admit to those feelings. To say, opening up my first test results was thrilling, is an understatement.

It’s a personal event opening up that letter. For those of you out there opening this letter by yourself all alone, I don’t recommend that. Do it if you must, it won’t kill you. I don’t mean to over dramatize the event. Some of you may need privacy opening this thing. Yet I recommend finding a friend or somebody with whom you can share this event. Open your results in supportive company or keep a trusty phone number to call immediately as you open the letter. Better yet call before you open it and keep them on the phone while you tear that sucker open!

If you read my previous post about overall pass rates, most exams are passed. This includes retakes, but still 74% of the exams taken in 2007 (by former ACSA school attendees) are passed. There is plenty of reason to be optimistic about test results.

That said, I passed Construction Documents and Services!

Using the 2007 published pass rate data from NCARB, you can tell the architectural registration exam parts were taken 36,435 times. Of those 36,435 exams, (any part schematic design, materials and methods, whichever), 26,991 of those exams were passed. That’s 74% of the exams passed. This data is exams taken, so any specific exam taken more than once in 2007 by the same person is included. 

This data includes the US and Canadian accredited schools listed on NCARB’s site and, like I said above, this data reflects people who have taken the exam more than once.

Let’s take a look at this data per school. Take for example The City College of New York (CCNY) graduates. 227 exams were taken and 117 were passed. So 52% of the exams were passed.

More than half of the exams taken by fellow CCNY graduates were passed. I choose to stay optimistic. 52%. That’s good. The glass is half full. Stay optimistic!

It is important to note this data does not include information from graduates of schools that are not National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) accredited. I think this data includes all graduates from the listed institutions, wether they have an accredited degree or not.

The higest exam pass rates were at Princeton University and University of Manitoba, with 108 exams passed out of 119 taken and 116 exams passed out of 128 taken, respectively.

I’m trying to upload my excel spreadsheet, so you can check how many exams were taken and passed in 2007 by fellow graduates from your institution. The spreadsheet also calculates the average pass rate overall for each exam, but these numbers do not match the overall pass rates listed on NCARB’s site. This is probably because the college data does not include all test takers as I stated above. (For example, of Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) schools, 3,024 Pre-Design exams were passed out of 3,671 Pre-Design exams taken. That’s 82% of the Pre-Design exams passed, including re-takers. That pass rate is higher than the 79% listed on NCARB’s site, probably because their data for overall pass rates includes all test takers, not just those who attended an ACSA school (which is an NAAB accredited school.))