LEED V4 BD+C Exam

Hi Elmer,

Thanks for your question and congrats again on passing the LEED Green Associate exam a couple of years back.

When you studied for the LEED Green Associate, you might remember that the exam was pretty difficult because it requires a lot of general knowledge of green building and LEED from multiple primary references. It also requires knowledge of the LEED for New Construction rating system.

You're better off just refreshing your memory on LEED as you prepare for the new LEED AP v4 BD+C exam because a good amount of what you will study will seem familiar to you based on your study of New Construction.

While 100% of the questions for the new LEED BD+C v4 exams come from the Reference Guide for BD+C, it's a 800+ page document and 80% of the material in the Reference Guide is NOT relevant to the exam. This is why you'll be better off using a focused study guide like the ones from GreenStep in our Education section.

Also, you should know that the new LEED v4 AP exams is different from the LEED Green Associate in three major ways:

1) More Detail: Add 20% to the amount of study time you would have needed for the LEED 2009 exams because the questions are wordier, and the information is denser...

The implications of this are that you may also have more trouble finishing the new 100 question exam within the 2 hour time frame. If you come to a question you don't know, mark it, skip it, and come back to it later on once you've gone through all the questions in the entire exam.

2) LEED Project Experience: The new LEED v4 exams gauge experience working on LEED projects from within the exam itself. Unlike LEED 2009, there is no longer an experience eligibility prerequisite, anyone can take the new exam.

USGBC strongly recommends that you have experience working on a LEED project prior to the exam. For this reason, we've incorporated actual LEED project experience into all of the GreenStep LEED AP v4 Study Guides here.

3) More calculations: Difficult calculation questions are common in the LEED AP v4 exams. Calculations may include basic addition and subtraction, but also may include calculating densities per acre, Floor Area Ratios (FAR), Full Time Equivalent (FTE) calculations, flow rate calculations for certain fixtures below the baseline, solar reflectance index (SRI) related roof slope calculations, % of parking spaces required for green vehicles or for bicycle storage, etc.

Let me know if you have any additional questions, and thanks again!

Rob