How to Pass the Alberta Real Estate Exam

To pass the Alberta Real Estate Exam in the first attempt is not everybody’s cup of tea. RECA (The Real Estate Council of Alberta) has laid down strict guidelines to be followed in order to appear for the exam and remain an eligible candidate. To understand the RECA Exam structure, there are a few focal points that must keep in mind. These tips can help you manage your real estate study guide and thus, come through the test with flying colors.

Understand the Exam Format

Aspirants applying for Alberta Real Estate Exam to become successful Real Estate Agents should understand how the exam structure goes and what is the whole process.

Online:

First thing you want to do when it comes to studying for the exam is to Understand the Exam Format. This step is very important because it will help you to become more efficient when you go to study for your exam. What you want to remember is that it is a computer-based exam, so you are not really writing any essays or anything.

When you go to the examination center, they will give you some paper and a pencil to write notes if you need to. But overall, you are not writing anything, it is all online.

Number of Questions:

You will have anywhere from 90 to 140 exam questions, depending on what exam you’re writing. If you are writing the fundamentals of real estate exam, there are 140 questions.

If you are writing residential exam, you will see 100 questions on the exam. If you are writing a commercial exam, you’ll have 90 questions. So, it really depends on what exam you are writing, but approximately 90 to about 140 questions is what you will see on the exam.

Minimum Passing Grade:

Regardless of what exam you’re writing, you do need a 70% to pass the Alberta Real Estate Exam, so you have to make sure you get more than 70% on your exam.

Question Structure:

All the questions on the exam will be multiple-choice questions, so you really don’t need to really memorize a ton of stuff, because everything will be in front of you, and you also don’t need to really write long essays, so multiple-choice questions are simpler to answer than essay questions, so we have a bit of an advantage there.

Create a Study Plan

Create a concrete Study Plan and understand the total content that would be required to memorize for your Alberta Real Estate Exam. And different things you want to keep in mind, or different elements of a study plan that you want to pay attention to, would be first to create a study schedule. Make sure you set time aside in your schedule to study.

All of us are busy, you may have a full-time job, a family, other activities that you need to participate in, so make sure you do set aside a certain amount of time, whether that’s every evening or it’s on the weekends, but make sure you set aside time that is in your calendar in order to study.

Otherwise, you will run out of time in the end, and you’ll be scrambling to study or go through all the material at the very end, and then it becomes very difficult to do. Make sure you create a study schedule, and you stick to it.

Break it down into Smaller Steps

Make sure you break down this goal to pass the Alberta real estate exam into smaller steps. So, you want to look at how many units you have and how much time you are going to spend per unit in order to do this, in order to finish all the material.

Again, if you leave it all to the end, it will become very difficult to cram everything. You will not understand the concepts and you’ll be trying to memorize stuff, so we do not want to be in that situation, or I have found that people run out of time, and then they have to pay again to take the course.

Set Realistic Goals

If you think you can go through the entire unit in a day, that will be hard to do. So, it is best to, again, break it down into smaller chunks and make sure you’re setting realistic goals for yourself in order to achieve this.

Understand the Distribution of Marks 

Next thing you want to do is to make sure you understand the marks distribution. All the units are not weighted equally. Some of the units will have a very small percentage of marks on the exam, others will be heavy units where you have a ton of stuff to study, so I highly recommend before you start studying, you look at your mark distribution, you will find this in your textbook.

So go through the exam distribution, and then look at how much time you need to put towards each unit. For example, in the fundamentals of the real estate exam, the first unit is only worth three marks. That means that that is not a priority. Understand the Exam Weightage given by RECA to the topics based on the units from each of the Real Estate Courses.

We need to prioritize the stuff that is weighted heavier, so make sure you look at your exam distribution, and you are allocating the appropriate amount of time to each unit based on the percentage weightage it is allocated in the exam.

Understand the Concepts

Next, you want to make sure you understand the concepts. It is not important to memorize everything. It is a multiple-choice exam. So, there is no need to memorize everything because things will be in front of us, they will ask us a question, and the options will be in front of us. But what we do want to do is understand the key concepts, because once you understand the key concepts, you will have a much easier time answering the questions.

So, make sure you understand the concepts and kind of stay away from trying to memorize stuff. There are a couple of different types of questions that you will see on the exam.

Most of the exam will be around Situational Questions, also called scenario type questions, where they will give you a scenario, and then based on that, you will have to answer the question. This is where your understanding of the concept really pays off. Once you understand the concept, you can then look at your scenario and extract the key element from that. All the names and places don’t really make that much of a difference, but go to the heart of the problem, look at what exactly are they asking you.

But then, how do you prepare yourself for the scenario questions?

Go through all the Examples

The best thing to do here will be to go through all the examples. There are a lot of examples that they provide you in the textbook, make sure you go through these examples, all the examples are in a box.

So, when you look at your book, you will see there are several boxes there. And each example will relate to the concept that they’re talking about, so make sure you read through all your examples, and you understand the concepts related to that, because a lot of times they will have questions that will be similar to the examples that they have provided in the book.

Now they may change the names and places, however, the heart of the problem is still the same, so make sure you go through and read all the examples.

Go through each of the Unit Quizzes

Next thing is to make sure you go through unit quizzes. Unit quizzes are very important because they really help you understand the concepts.

Now, they do not have a ton of scenario questions, but there are scenario questions that you can learn from the quizzes, but they really help you prepare the concepts.

Another type of questions that you will see on the exam will be Definition-based Questions. Here, either they are looking for a definition of a term, or they will give you a definition, and they will ask you, what term does this definition describe?

Key Terms

Make sure that you understand your key terms like real property, real estate, GDP, condominium plan, different types of condominiums, that type of stuff. So, to answer the definition-based questions, we really want to understand the key terms.

There is a glossary at the end of the book that you can go to, and you can read through that glossary and make sure you understand the terms.

On the other hand, Alberta Real Estate School helps you understand the Real Estate Terminology and Regulatory Bodies that help you assist in understanding the Alberta Real Estate Market.   

Unit Activities

It’s also important to go through the unit activities. Unit activities are set up to help you understand the definition-based questions, especially the fill in the blanks type of activities.

These activities are great because they will help you understand the key term and learn the definition of this. Now, there are not any fill in the blank type of questions on the exam, but again, we are learning the key terms here.

With Alberta Real Estate School, we can guide you with our extensive list of Mock Questions and Practical help for Unit Quiz. Get to know more about our Real Estate Tutoring Services.  

Make Notes

And last of all, make sure you take notes as you are going through your material, because we do not want to spend too much time going through every single page of the textbook, so it will be important for you to extract the key concepts and key terms that you want to learn.

And when it is time to prepare for the exam, you’re only going through your notes, and you don’t have to go through the entire book again.

Our Extensive Notes are filtered with key areas of focus to minimize cluttered content into summarized pieces of information to help you understand the concept better. It will also help you prepare for your exams in a much simpler format.

Get access to a sample of our special filtered notes by signing up HERE.

What Else do you Need?

All of these are just strategic goals that you can follow to achieve a sense of perfection in your preparation. The real test comes in when you try to give your best but that is not enough. That is when some genuine help from experts serve the purpose. Raman Gakhal, our Instructor at Alberta Real Estate School is best at giving personal tutoring on Real Estate topics. We can offer niche and specific advice on the important topics that you can expect in the exam.

“Alberta Real Estate School makes a Difference. It helps you pass the Alberta Real Estate Exam in the first attempt!”