Shared by kathmor from ARE forum

Took the whole enchilada! And PASSED! The combined BD+C tests made for a long time at prometric but I am glad I did them both at once. After just finishing the ARE it wasn't so bad. I came out with scores of 188 for the GA and 185 for BD+C.

GA was a cakewalk and I knew I passed. It took me 45 min. But BD+C was a little toughy and as others have said, I wasn't sure I was gonna make the cut when I hit end. I had 1 min left after checking all marked and knew I wasn't going to get through all 100 to recheck so I just ended it and held my breath.

I first read and used a lot of different things but finally ended up focusing on:

1. the USGBC Ref Guide (bible)
2. practice tests from GBES & greenlearner
3. studio4's 11x17 credit cummary chart (just this page)
4. and my own outline notes of the ref guide that I summarized, culled and re-wrote from memory until I had my own shorthand version of all the credits that I could write quickly at the actual exam. [Just a FYI once you finished the GA test there is no break or tutorial that occurs before the BD+C test, it starts right away. I had to spend a few minutes writing notes while the clock was ticking. Had I known I would have used the extra time from the GA portion of the test to write notes.]

Also, as I took practice tests I copied and pasted information/explanations into a word document and studied that in the last week too (ended up with 25 pages!)
I started taking practice test after pratice test (at least 3 per day) on Monday until today (tested at 3:30pm) and was getting in the low to mid 90's. The practice tests are the key to understanding the ref guide.

My test was particulary focused on EA but I had a good overture of all the credits and their EP's if applicable in there too. I marked all calcs that were not an instant " I know that" because man that software calculater sucks! I had probably 2 clacs that I just outright guessed on and probably 10 others I really didn't know the answer, another 20 I had a good chance of getting right and the rest I was pretty sure of. I studied slowly in the beginning then really gaining momentum in the last month averaging about 4hours a day.
That's all she wrote...hope this helps and GOOD LUCK!

So happy my year in testing purgatory is finally OVAHHHH!!