But... I did this with serious help from my wonderful husband and a wee learning-all-over-again-because-I-never-get-to-do-this-curve. While I know what I'm doing, I freeze on the time limit, which is (1) hour.
Staying true to my inner toddler, I stomped downstairs and begged Andrew for 20 minutes of engineer logic. 1 hour of training wheels later, he was letting me ride off into the sunset of exit stairs and dotted lines and calculations! Wee!
See a list of strategies and approaches I found helpful in completing this exercise quickly and accurately in this post!
How I did:
- All spaces meet minimum SF requirements
- All walls drawn to columns, not mullions
- All doors recessed into spaces, so as not to protrude more than 7" into corridor
- All Rooms labeled with Name, SF, and Occupancy
- All Occupancy totals rounded UP!
- All corridors 60" and dimensioned
- All turning circles for ADA clearance placed at corridor changes of direction
- Attention paid to dead end corridors
- Diagonal drawn across space requiring 2 exits, calculation done, dimensioned doors distance from one another
Could work on:
- Pay attention to dead end corridors - mine conformed to code and so did some of the solutions... the graders marked this as wrong (?) or they just said "watch it, kid!"
- Didn't do that whole ADDING farthest path of travel to common path of travel to each stair. Oops!
Helpful to do and the grader's do look at it.
- I scribbled my little "grid block" strategy on the side of my plan
- I scribbled some calculations on the side of my plan
They say to hand in everything: trace, post-its, calculations.
Between this review and this one, I feel a lot stronger. Repetition with plan practice is key. Using strategies that work for you is also key. I love having this blog of references, tips, and facts - it's easy to study briefly during lunch at work or on a night when I'm not feeling motivated to pull out the plans, but I want to review what I've done. After all, you can't do a test every night (unless you buy all of the practice tests!). I'm actually looking forward to my simulation test day.
Feeling better,
Carolyn
Thanks, Laura! I do understand dead-end corridors, but as long as they do not exceed the maximum length, they are acceptable (mine are within, as were two of the sample tests). That’s why I’m questioning the “graders” comments on the practice test solutions. If it’s compliant, why would it be marked down? Anyway, yes – I will continue to include my math/logic on my test vellum – including the day of! Good luck!!
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