Project Planning & Design (PPD) ARE 5.0 Mock Exam (Architect Registration Examination): ARE 5.0 Overview, Exam Prep Tips, Hot Spots, Case Studies, Drag-and-Place, Solutions and Explanations

What can I say about Gang Chen's mock exams? At $80 per book (01/11/2020 at the time of writing), it is a lot of money for what little material Gang Chen is offering. The actual mock exam is 92 pages and the rest of the book is either lists of suggested study material, formulas that you can find on NCARB's website or promotions for his other books. The actual mock exam is 120 questions and the text is set to a pretty big font size.In terms of content in the mock exam, I found it to be helpful in preparing for the PPD exam. Gang covers a wide range of topics including but not limited to: HVAC systems, psychometric charts, structural calculations and the like. If the book was priced cheaper, I would definitely buy more but at $80 a piece, you're honestly not getting a whole lot for your money's worth. If you have the money to burn, i'd recommend it. If not, I would suggest you using other resources that might be priced more sensibly.

Project Planning & Design was the final ARE exam that my husband had to complete, and he took it twice, unsuccessfully, before buying this book. This time, he passed! Giving this book five stars for being part of the wining formula: in addition to this book, on this third try he read several other books - Building Construction Illustrated, The Architect's Studio Companion, Heating, Cooling, Lighting, and Designing for Earthquakes. He had already read the official ARE study materials on an earlier try. He said this book was very to-the-point and provided some useful testing strategies. I hope this helps other ARE takers!

Not terribly thrilled with this book. This was the second of these that I purchased and I might be going in a different direction. There are numerous spelling errors and some of the questions reference other questions which are not numbered properly. For example: "reference the response to question 37" when question 37 has no relation to the question referencing. Some of the questions have duplicate responses which represents more errors.

I like that the author tells you what to study for and gives great tips for remembering material. It’s straight to the point, cuts all the unnecessary information out

The typos in this book are incredibly frustrating. Not even 60 questions in and I've already found 3 questions that are blatantly wrong.Way too much fluff in this book. Print is ridiculously huge. You could probably fit the exam and its answers on 30 pages and just have all 6 mock exams in one book. Its worth about $20 bucks not the $60 I paid. About 80% of the question are good for this test, the rest are just unrealistic. I only recommend it if you need extra practice questions and only if you can get in way cheaper.

I purchased this book because I try to take as many practice exams as I can while studying. He writes in this book that if you score a 60% on his exam, you will pass PPD. I scored a 75% and still failed. I’ve taken 4 exams and this is the first time I used one of these books and also failed. I will be purchasing different books for resources next time. Questions and case study weren’t like the real exam at all.

I prefer the Chen practice exams/study guides to any others (Kaplan, Ballast, etc.) Highly recommended. Every exam I've used Chen's practice exams and study guides for have been 1st try passes (ARE 4.0 and 5.0.)

Good study tool