Courtesy of karindalziel

While it’s still (kind of) fresh in my mind, I want to share with all of you who plan on taking the LEED® NC v. 2.2 exam how I studied. The exam is hard. No matter how hard you study there will be questions that surprise you.

I was fortunate enough to have support from LarsonO’Brien, which allowed me to register for webinars and workshops supplied by the USGBC. These were helpful, but they are not required. You can pass the test without these extras.

The webinars I took were:

• Green Building Basics and LEED – very introductory, if you’ve never heard of LEED, start here.
• Essentials of LEED Professional Accreditation – the LEED process & project team, categories & credits

The workshops I attended were:

• LEED Core Concepts & Strategies – basic overview of categories, synergies between credits
• Understanding Project Costs & Returns – not on the exam, but helpful for proposing LEED to clients
• LEED for New Construction Technical Review – brief overview of every credit

Again, these webinars and workshops were helpful because they were another avenue, which I used to expose myself to LEED® concepts. They were not as in depth as I had hoped, but helpful nonetheless.

You will need the LEED NC v. 2.2 Reference Guide. Think of this as the text book for the exam. Or the Bible. Know it forwards and backwards, sideways and upside down. I read it straight through and realized that nothing stuck. Then I made lists of the credit name, intent, standards and requirements. The thing I did not list was the submittal requirements. Know these, too.

I found that creating a list of each credit was helpful. Knowing the name of the credit helped me remember the intent and hinted at the requirements. Remembering the standard was difficult for me, until I completed the Technical Review workshop, then it suddenly made sense.

The other thing that I found helpful was summarizing the intent and requirements – not knowing them verbatim, but knowing them your own way, may help.

You can find lots of free practice quizzes online. These will help you get comfortable selecting multiple correct answers for one question. Just search LEED Practice Questions on your Web browser and lots of sites will come up. I did not pay for practice quizzes. Some good practice quizzes can be found on these sites:

• GBCI Exam prep questions
• University of Florida LEED resources

The best advice I can give is to know how you study most effectively. Are you good at memorizing things? The more ways you can study for this, the better. Present the material to yourself in different ways. Have people quiz you. Make flash cards, lists, read things out loud to yourself – what ever it is that you need to do to remember things. Study for about an hour then take a break. See if you remember anything. I often studied for a few days in a row, then, didn’t do any studying for a few days.

The exam tests your knowledge of four LEED sections, but the material is not broken into sections during the exam. By that, I mean that questions 1 – 20 are not all about credits, and 20 – 40 are not all about project team, etc. These sections are all lumped together:

• LEED credit intents and requirements
• Project and team coordination
• Implementation of LEED process
• Knowledge to verify, participate in, and perform technical analyses required for LEED credits

It is an 80-question, multiple choice exam. You have two hours to complete the exam. For more information about the exam format, visit the  Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI).

I recommend that you take the day off the day before the exam. Review any content that you have had trouble with. This will give you a quiet day, without distractions, to bring everything you’ve learned to the front of your mind.

Good Luck! You’ll want to take a nap after the exam.