In spite of the fact that this exam has the highest pass rate overall at 76%, I feel the least confident about my performance on this one. Unfortunately, I let other things get in the way of my studying - I may have only put in 10 hours for this one. I did not study from anything beyond the Kaplan and Ballast study guides. Usually, I try to do a quick review of pertinent codes or whatever other major industry standard book is recommended by NCARB. This time, however, I did not.
I think I should have spent more time preparing for the vignettes as well. For some reason the grading one trips me up - I feel like on the one hand you want to make smooth curves, but on the other hand the more you move the lines the more it sounds that you could be docked for disturbing the site. I guess I just don't feel that tweaking topography lines is as literal as they are making it with this particular exam. Does anyone really go out to a site afterwords to verify that every square inch of grass is between 2% and 20% grade? I have never seen it. But, that's besides the point with these exams!
Anyway, in conclusion (so you may get some use out of this post), I would recommend going hardcore with the vignettes. Do the NCARB ones and try like 3 of each of whatever other practice ones you can get. If I have to retake this again in six months, I'm going to do every practice vignette I can find.
Multiple choice-wise, I would say brush up in the codes section, you never know which piece of code they're going to ask you and you don't have a lot of questions in the section so each answer has a lot of weight.
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