The starting line

Well, as promised in my opening post, an addendum to exam schedule is already in order. Today is my first exam (Constrution Documents & Services). I must say that I thought I would know more about the subject as I spend most of my time creating CDs everyday. It has been the whole "services" part that is demanding most of my study time. I feel like I could pass the BAR, now knowing all of the legal vocabulary required to build a building. Well maybe not the BAR, but hopefully at least this section of the ARE.
Much of my delay in starting can be attributed to my lack of foresight as to how much I would need to learn as opposed to already know. Turns out that I don't spend most of my days reviewing AIA Document B141 - Standard form of agreement betwen owner and architect, or A201- General conditions of the contract for construction. Both of which are 20 and 50 page documents respectively full of legal obilgations between the architect, owner, & contractor. Don't get me wrong, I do need to know these things and quite frankly am a little embarrassed that I didn't already. The good news is, I'm pretty confident that I do now.

Switching gears, the format of the test is as follows:
100 multiple choice questions (2 hours)
A building section vignette (1 hour)
For those that need further explantion of a vignette, it is a design portion of the test where I actually draft a building section based on the floor plans that they give me. It has been rumored to be very easy on the ARE forum online, almost too easy, but I don't plan on taking it for granted.

With that, I am off to the first of 7 tests. I'll post an update later tonight after, to let everyone know how it went.