LEED exam prep ain't easy

I've been studying for the LEED accredited professional exam for the past several weeks partly because I have a personal interest in green building and I would like to have a professional certification reflecting this, and partly because I have nothing else to do since I got canned from my job (besides blogging of course). Let me tell you what, this is a lot of material to digest and spit back at a testing center computer screen in 2.5 hours with nothing but a photo ID as a reference. Trust me, this isn't enough.

I've never been great at memorization and I don't really know why. Perhaps it is because I don't feel the need to remember things that I can just look up later, or perhaps my brain is only capable of holding a very finite amount of information. Regardless, I've always been better when I had a cheat sheet of formulas or methods and then applied them to a problem. So memorizing gobs of information associated with 69 LEED credits is not my forte. I think I'd rather take a class in contract law, and that's pretty bad.

Since I've been exposed to LEED much more over the past six weeks, I've been noticing it more in the news and blogs that I have come across. Nicolette Toussaint who posted a blog today on the greening of school projects, noted that not only does green building present significant energy savings to schools but also increases student and teacher health (less absenteeism) and is consistent with higher test scores.

This phenomenon also holds true for businesses, where green office buildings decrease worker absenteeism and increases productivity on average of 1-7% according to the US Green Building Council. Yes business owners, that means mo' money in yo' pocket. I can already hear the boardroom high fiving. Or perhaps they'll celebrate with a stiff bloody mary on the corporate jet.

However, all this new found knowledge for green building will be much less useful if I don't pass this test of facts, figures, and processes. I need to figure out in the next two weeks what I need to do to get all of this info in my head without losing other very important facts like my Facebook password, my street address, or my mother's maiden name (I would then be unable to retrieve my Facebook password).

I resorted first to the tried and true method of flashcards. I have not made up flashcards since fourth grade and now at the ripe age of th-th-th-thirty one years I'm without a job, making up flash cards, and hoping like hell that I pass a LEED certification, ahem, accreditation exam. This valiant attempt at conventional memorization proved to be much less effective when I dropped my neatly organized flashcards. Many of the credits had two or three cards each and I was left trying to peice back..., oh well, you get the idea. Flashcards are a pain in the a**.

This is the last year you can take the LEED AP exam on the current rating system because they will soon be changing the system to weight credits on a scale of importance (sorry, it's too late to sign up). Presently, a project will earn the same number of LEED points for redeveloping and remediating a former site of a thermo-nuclear reactor as it would for putting a bike rack out front. So this is a much needed change, but the exam will undoubtedly be much more difficult and I'm scared s**tless about passing it this time around.

Perhaps I'm overreacting, and I hope I am, but if this cramming doesn't pay off I'm going to be a perennial LEED AP test taker. I'll have to build a personal green study facility to increase my learning potential and brain capability. This may not be a bad idea, but I really hope it doesn't come to this.

LEED exam prep ain't easy