November 2025

Back in July the Psychic Chicken at Pike Place Market told me “the month of November will bring luck to you.” 15 days before that prediction I scheduled my first ARE for November 21st, with the intention of starting to study after getting back from vacation. I need deadlines for any semblance of motivation so that is why I scheduled so far in advance. And look, the chicken was right, yay. This is just one exam of many, but I am releasing myself of external pressure. I’m doing it on whatever timeline I feel like. I won’t force myself through them. Taking this one was mostly to demystify the experience.

some miscellaneous thoughts

• can I just say that ARE is a cool acronym, but it makes it inconvenient to google
• you aren’t allowed to have scratch paper. In ‘real life’ you will have scratch paper. Just a pet peeve.
• it is a pretty distracting test environment to be surrounded by a bunch of people taking different exams and opening and closing the door. but I survived. Also survived having the test screen go white with 15 minutes remaining… that spiked my heart rate way up. The proctor was able to resolve it.
• I wish the official testing body had more than one practice test. I ‘failed’ every practice test I took (four… three of which were from external sources), but by the last one I think I only failed by like 2 or 3 questions. Every exam has a different percentage of questions you need to get right so it is hard to estimate. On the real deal I was pretty short on time during the case studies and educated-guessed on several questions but made out ok. I agree with the general online consensus that the real exam feels easier than the practice (better than the other way around).

Anyway. With both the deadline at work and the exam on the same day, the rest of November was smooth sailing with my brother visiting for Thanksgiving.