Why Your Day Job Might Be Making LARE Planning and Design Harder
A capable, experienced professional scores well on practice tests, walks into the Planning and Design (P&D) section, and walks out sure they failed. I’ve seen it happen more than once. Sometimes they did fail, and sometimes it was their second try.
Usually it isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a framing problem.
Your experience is real, but the exam isn’t asking about it
If you work in a specialized setting, like a federal agency, an engineering firm, or a niche design practice, you’ve learned how your organization does things. Those habits serve you well at work. On the L.A.R.E., they can quietly work against you.
The exam is written for a minimally competent, generalist landscape architect. It doesn’t care how your office runs a site plan or a program. It wants the broadly correct professional answer, based only on what the question tells you.
Change the question you ask yourself
Stop asking, “What would I do at work?” Ask instead: “Which answer best protects health, safety, and welfare and fits the information actually given?”
If something isn’t in the question, treat it as unknown. Experienced people tend to fill gaps with details from their own practice, and that’s exactly how a reasonable answer becomes a wrong one.
Study the questions you got right
Most candidates only review their misses. Go back to the questions you got right but felt unsure about, too. They show where your instincts and the exam’s logic still disagree, and that gap costs points on test day.
For each one, write a single sentence on why the keyed answer beats the others. After a few weeks, you’ll start to see the reasoning the exam rewards.
Find where your misses cluster
Sort your wrong and shaky answers into the topic areas CLARB lists for P&D in the current candidate handbook. Most people find one or two areas doing most of the damage. Spend your study time there instead of rereading everything.
For a full week-by-week approach, see How to Pass LARE Planning and Design: A Study Plan and our Planning and Design section guide.
Failing a section isn’t the end of the story
Plenty of licensed landscape architects failed a section along the way. A failed attempt tells you what to fix. Retakes cost another $545, so make the next attempt count: adjust how you read the questions, target your weak areas, and go back in.
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John Denson is a licensed landscape architect in Arizona with more than 20 years of practice and the founder of LandCertPrep.
