There is a rumor going around that the QCI Exam is virtually impossible to
pass!
How hard could it be?
As a Quality Control Inspector you have to know a lot about
a lot! But you already know a
lot. The Quality Control Inspector
Handbook is designed to help focus what you already know.
A lot of people have already taken the courses and passed
the exams. The more you know the
easier it will be and the more comfortable you will feel going into the exams. If you had designed the combustion
analyzer tools, wouldn’t you feel more comfortable performing the CAZ testing?
Bill Spohn, one of the experts among the video interviews,
actually did design some of the combustion analysis tools. He has the patents to prove it.
Would you feel more comfortable answering the “soft skills”
questions if you had a psychologist standing beside you? John Dolen has worked with adults for
over 40 years.
How about having someone who has done QC on more than 40,000
houses as A. Tamasin Sterner has done helping you answer your questions?
Tap into what you know
There are certainly questions on the QCI exam that will seem
to have multiple right answers.
That’s the problem with multi-choice tests. It’s really hard to right a question that has only one right
answer that is based on reasoning and common sense. But you can be sure that the people who wrote the test
thought there was only one right answer.
The trick is using your knowledge and common sense to discard the wrong
ones and ferret out the right one.
The Residential QCI Handbook has a whole section on taking
multiple choice exams – how to break them down into the component parts that
focus on the meat of the question and jettison the extraneous information that
is designed to throw you off the track.
There are connections and links to the program information
that you should have a familiarity with.
There are the tools – the manometers, the combustion
analyzers, the blower doors, and the duct testers - that you should be intimately familiar with going into the
test. The book touches on those
things but tools are something that you should put your hands on and work
with. One trainer told his
son that he should set up and take down the duct tester 50 times before he took
a class in how to test ducts.
Colin Genge the president of Retrotec says that you should be able to
tell the difference between a manometer hose that someone is standing on and
one that is pinched in a doorway.
Who am I to tell you all this stuff?
I’ve been working with building science since I started my
first company in 1977. I’ve
learned what I know by doing it and by working with the remarkable people in
the industry, listening to them, and hopefully passing what we know along. I published the Residential Ventilation
Handbook in 2009 with McGraw-Hill.
I am a Certified QCI Master Trainer, and I am Chair of the SWS Heating,
Cooling, and Ventilation Subcommittee.
But more than all of that is that I am proud to consider the people who
have helped me learn and put this book together as friends.
The Building Science Community
We need qualified, thorough, knowledgeable, and efficient
Quality Control Inspectors who are constantly learning and constantly
teaching. I hope you will join
this elite group for a successful and rewarding career.
