March Section D

[Jeffrey Orkin]

Did anyone take section D last week? I was a little surprised how many plant related questions were on there, I really was under the impression that the LARE didn’t test specific plant knowledge, just general planting fundamentals.

There must have been 6+ questions asking to pick the best plants for a scenario and plenty of scientific names that I didn’t recognize.

I guess 4 weeks from now we’ll know how it went, just was a little disappointed to have those questions on there.

[Eric Gilbey]

Jeffrey, This has been the case with the exam for some time… even when we had to draw planting plans in one section. They would still ask questions in the multiple choice sections about plants and planting design. One thing you can be sure about the exam…you will be asked to show that you know the content in more than one way in many of the topics, because in some cases, you could guess your way through some of the questions, but when asked in other situations, you may show your lack of knowledge, skills or ability. If you really did know the content, they will see that in correct responses consistently, rather than a lucky guess once and a wrong response later. Generally the plant questions will give you a large amount of plants to choose from and more than one plant could have been right, based on your geographic location…but I would suspect the computers would not discern that you were answering from the SE United States and you actually chose a plant tolerant to the SW United States (it would just recognize that the plant you chose was either one of the correct or incorrect choices). Best of luck in the exam process!

[Daniel Miller]

Yeah, I would agree. This is the second time I have taken it, and there was a significant jump in specific plant questions on this version. In my prior experience, I think there was one specific question (asking genus and species) and a couple of generic (what type of plant is best suited in this situation…hedge, evergreen tree, native grasses, etc…) this one had about 4 or 5 specific plant questions.

The planting questions was the one section I was least prepared for. Good luck to all who took it.

[Ray Freeman]

I’d be interested in hearing about the questions on plant materials. They were all on D?
It was just scientific names? Does anyone recall the names of plants or specific questions? This is the first time in some years that there have been more than 2-3 plant questions on the exam.

[Daniel Miller]

Don’t remember any of the specific plant names, but they were mostly along the lines of…

“You have a _______ type of planting situation where the owner is looking for low water usage, it gets full sun, and will need to withstand moderate foot traffic….” ( or somethign similar….)

then it gave you options A – E, all of which contained 3 or 4 plants (only scientific names) and you had to pick.

At best, i knew 1 or 2 GENUS per answer selection…nevermind knowing all of the genus and species.

[Phillip J Hutchinson]

It’s been a few years since I took the exams, but I don’t recall any questions about specific plant material. There were a handful of general questions regarding plant types and placement, but I would’ve been seriously stressed if they were popping in scientific names and asking for answers that included specific plant types.

[Lori Molitor]

I counted at least 6 (maybe 8) questions that required you know two types of information. First, they all set up a situation so you had to know which types of plants were appropriate in that situation (ie. surrounding a playground). Exact plants were the second type of information you needed to demonstrate knowledge on. There was only one answer choice per question (none of that I, II and III nonsense). However, I think they did offer two pairs of plant combos for each answer choice to account for regional differences.

For instance, a question may sound like, “For planting a narrow strip between a parking lot and a roadway, you would choose…” and the answer choices would be
A. Liquidambar styraciflua and Vinca major or Populus nigra and Fragaria californica
B. Pyrus calleryana and Nandina Domestica or Washingtonia filifera and Carpobrotus edulis
C. etc.
D. etc.

You need to know that screening is your goal and then you need to know if those plants will provide that form. Being from Texas, I didn’t recognize many of the plants from our typical available stock.

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