Archicad - preparing for the online test

So basically, in order to get the certification you will need to pass the online test. This section of the course is fully dedicated to explaining the constraints, best practices of the test and some suggestions of how can you enhance your score over time.

In order to get the test you need to go to https://www.graphisoft.com/learning/online_certification/

Here you can see a promotional text that emphasizes the importance of the Archicad knowledge and in a sense it's all true. Also it is worth saying that this test is really well thought and truly shows your level of Archicad knowledge.

You can go to Rules section and check how does the test work.

Well what's written here is true, but not all of the test's constraints are listed here. As you can see

• We have multiple choice questions, which means that the questions can be about anything in Archicad like: editing tools, views, layouts, rendering, scheduling even EcoDesigner Star is included, so be ready for really anything
• There are 50 questions randomly assigned from a database (which is quite huge, I think more that 2000 questions that are constantly updated as new versions of Archicad come)
• 4 Choices for each question
• 90 seconds per question (this applies to all questions although some of them have really big amount of texts to read through)

So these are the constraints that are listed here, but what is not written in here is that

• The wrong answers do not subtract you any points. This is an additive system, which means you start at 0 and each correct answers gives you 2%s. Wrong answers do not subtract any percents. So even if you do not know the correct answer to the question, it is always better to chose the one that seems likely to be correct in your opinion or if you don't have any preference among the answers just try a random one and you will have 25% chance to get it correct.
• What is also not written in here that the questions have no weight which means, regardless of how easy or difficult the question is, it will bring you the same 2%s. And to be honest the difficulty of the questions can highly vary. Make sure you get all the marks for the easy questions.
• There's no order of the questions, not in the question type, not in difficulty. They come in a complete random order which sometimes can be confusing.

In a very very rare occasions you may encounter questions that either have more than one correct answer, or the correct answer isn't there. It happened to me twice but again this is an unlikely event and they are continuously working such errors so 99% of the time the test works just fine. 

Now let's dive deeper into the test itself and get the idea of 

• what can we expect of the test
• See what types of questions there are
• What type of answers we should provide
• Different methods for answering those questions
• And some very important notes to bear in mind while doing the test

So what to expect from the test.

This is the general picture that you'll get in the test. You have the question number on the top, which will count its way all up to to 50. You have the question itself written in bald. And here you can have a huge variety of question types. You can get a case study question like this, you can get TRUE/FALSE statement questions, which we'll discuss a bit later, you can get questions where the answer is supposed to continue the question sentence and so on. On the right hand side you have the timer which counts as said before from one and a half minutes down regardless of the question's level of difficulty. In most cases this is pretty much enough to fully read and comprehend the question, chose the correct answer, double-check it and hit next. So don't be afraid of timing, in most cases you will have plenty of time. This part here usually represents the content of the question. Though sometimes you can get a question without an image here. Don't be surprised, it's not that your browser didn't load it. It just means that this question doesn't really need an image associated to it. Down here you have the answer choice section which always consists of 4 answers. You will see the types of answers that you can find here a bit later.  You click the answer that you prefer and just hit Next to continue. Remember, click the next button only once, otherwise you may skip one question and if you do so, there's no way of going back and answering it. You will simply lose points.

In my further presentation I you may see some rearranged images of the test but that's just for the sake of better visibility. In real test this is always going to be the layout that you will see.

One important thing here. Don't let the answering for the last moment. Keep at least 10 seconds of leeway for yourself in order to not miss the answer. And even if you chose the correct answer but not click Next button, you are not going to get any points. So, make sure you click within time. And the timing is per question, which means if you answer the question quickly and save time, this time isn't going to be transferred to the next question. You will get the same one and a half minutes each time. Bearing this in mind I would suggest not to rush. If you have plenty of time, double-check your answer. Go up to the question again, make sure you haven't missed anything, because some questions may be very tricky indeed. So be careful with that.

Nevertheless if you do not succeed to answer within the given time. You will find this message here. Now I would like to pause here for a moment and share some experience how this unfortunate occasion of the test progress may actually be of some benefit. As mentioned earlier we have 50 questions, one and a half minute each, which means that in all we have at maximum 75 minutes given for the test. Practically it never reaches the 75 minutes, usually the test takes from 30 to 50 minutes depending on your experience and knowledge. Still, this test gonna take plenty of your time and full attention. This message here has no countdown associated with it. You can hang around with it as long as you want so this makes it a good opportunity to use this pause the refresh yourself, answer a call or whatever you may need to do at that moment. And one last important message here. Do not refresh you page. Otherwise you will lose your progress of the test.

The final results page of your test is going to look like this. You get your overall score here. If you overall score is high enough you will have the opportunity to publish your score in the hall of fame. The info that you have provided earlier to start the test will be displayed in the table. The score that you need to have in order to get to the hall of fame depends on the competition of that particular Archicad version, but usually it's somewhere above 80%. On the right you'll have the session ID which is a unique ID associated to your test, which can be later referred to. And the table that shows your stats. As you can see there are some categories for questions, which include all the functions and features that Archicad can provide. Right columns show how many questions there were from each category and how many of them were answered correctly respectively. And based on the number of the given correct answers you see the percentage that you have obtained for each category which in average gives your overall score. Pay attention to the following fact that I had 12 questions from the modeling category and only one question from visualization category. Each category has it's own percentage while in making the overall score and each of those categories values 1/9th of the overall score. This means that the lesser questions you have got in the category, the more impact will each of the questions in that category make.

Down to the results table you will see the breakdown of the questions that you haven't answered correctly. Now, this is very kind of GRAPHISOFT showing the wrong answers because the intention of this test is not only to check the current knowledge of a user but also to show the mistakes. Here you see the number of the incorrectly answered question and the category that it belongs to. If you click on the question you will have a drop down content that will show you the question itself, the incorrect answers in red of which the outlined one will be the one you chose. And of course the correct answer in green. After each test, dedicate some time to go through the incorrect answers and get the knowledge behind it.

In this lecture we are going to breakdown the test itself. So what questions you may expect. In all I would divide the into two groups that of Knowledge Based and Experience Based.

Knowledge based means that the answers to these questions is usually hard to be figured out alone, you will need to have actually learnt it. There are plenty of learning resources that will be discussed further but in order to give you an example, let's have a look at this question here.

What type of Priority-Based Connections are generate by ARCHICAD using the Connection Method. We can see some sort of terminology here, like Priority Based Connections which you actually need learn what it means. And you need to know what is the connection method. Now in ARCHICAD there's a huge amount of knowledge that you need to bear be aware of not only for taking the test obviously, but also to have a proper workflow for yourself at first place. Lot of times you may find out that the program behaves not the way you'd expect it to. This is usually not because there's a failure in the program but rather there's something going around under the hood of which you are not aware of. Priorities of building materials is a very good example of it, the effect of which often embarrasses users, because they don't understand why certain things happen. So you need to learn a lot of stuff in order to be able to answer to questions like this.

Another types of questions will be experience based. Which means there isn't really any particular knowledge or idea associated with it, it just checks how much of experience you have of working with Archicad. Have a look at the question here. 

In the Drawing Manager, what does the field on the illustration mean?

Now, if you have worked in Archicad you will quickly recognize this icon which represents an elevation. Lot's of those type of questions refer to your experience and some may be easy as this one. But some may be very challenging and usually only very skilled users are answering them correctly. In this type of questions I would underline the ones that are about the Pet Palette in Archicad. As you may know each time you grab a node or an edge of an element to edit it you are getting this floating companion with contextualized commands for your help. The questions about Pet Palettes are omnipresent. You will encounter them every time you take the test, so while you work with Archicad, use it as much as can to get fully aware of eat.

What types of answers do we get to chose from?

They can be numeric, textual and image answers. And we'll now look at the examples for each of those.

Numeric answer means that you are going to have a content image below the question. And on that image you will see field that have associated numbers with them. You will have to chose the corresponding field for the question. Now in this case we have four indicated numbers on the content image and four answers to chose from. However, this is not always the case. As you see in the example here, you have again four answers to chose from but as oppose to the previous example, they are not 1, 2, 3 and for, but 8, 11, 6, 12. This is because on the content image we have a whole lot of 12 fields or icons to chose from. Don't get confused, just check which of the indicated numbers are present in you list of answers and spend time only on those four to spot the correct answer.

Another type of the answers will be the textual answers. These questions do not always require a content image associated with them, so as said earlier don't get confused if there's no image. Just read the question and follow your way to the answer. Be aware that in some cases you might have textual answers that are almost the same, so maybe only one word will differ one from another. And also you might sometimes get textual answers that are very very long. They don't happen too often but they are the ones that will drain the most time from you.

And finally we have questions that give you images to chose from. They may be small like icons or big like whole screenshots of dialogue boxes. Now don't get it wrong. If only one of the given images is correct it doesn't mean the others contain some fallacy or are photoshoped. Rather you will have an outlined field in each of the images like the example here and you will have to chose the image that contains the correct field outlined. A good suggestion here will be always to double check if you have chosen the correct answer, because basically here in order to chose an answer you can click anywhere on the big image. And since they are not scaled you are getting a long scroll-able page with lot of clickable area and it often happens that you make click on a wrong image. Make sure to check your answer in the end.

In the database of this test there are more that 2000 unique questions about pretty much anything and each time you are going to get a brand new set of questions. So this is not a test that you can memorize all the answers you should actually know the software in order to answer the questions. And even if you stumble upon a question that looks familiar to you, it might not be the same that you have seen, because there are lot of questions that look very similar and they even use the same image for the question content, so following your memory to guess the answer based on the test taken previously may be misleading to you. Make sure to fully read and process the question entirely every time in order to not miss any important details.

I can tell from my and my colleague's experience that this course was giving us the exact same results until we decided to dedicate more time to learning and so only then we got our scores increased.

Some useful links for learning

• http://www.graphisoft.com/learning/online-seminars/
• http://www.graphisoft.com/learning/training-materials/
• http://www.graphisoft.com/learning/archicad-books/
• http://www.graphisoft.com/learning/education/
• https://www.youtube.com/user/Archicad
• https://www.youtube.com/user/EricBobrow
• https://helpcenter.graphisoft.com/
• https://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/

Certification Test link

http://www.graphisoft.com/learning/online_certification/index_partner_certified.html

Contacts link

https://www.graphisoft.com/info/contact/