Black SpectaclesReviews of blackspectacles.com

Black Spectacles will automatically renew your subscription without notification. There is no phone number available to contact them to resolve issues. You must cancel the subscription within two days to avoid being charged in full. I contacted their online chat support, but the representative asked me to wait for over 50 minutes and then stopped responding. All of my purchase information was clearly listed in my account under Orders and was easy to find. Update: Black Spectacles eventually responded and refunded the full amount of my subscription after I waited over an hour at my computer before walking away. The representative could have informed me that she would follow up by email instead of asking me to remain on standby. I also strongly recommend that Black Spectacles send advance renewal notifications so members have sufficient time to make changes or cancel if needed. I changed my rating to four stars because the customer service representative followed up on my complaint and genuinely wanted to make the company better and more transparent for customers.

I hadn't sat for an ARE exam in 3+ years and passed PPD and PDD on the first try back. The practice exams and quizzes provided through Black Spectacles are comparable to what you'd see on the exam. The videos were helpful for me as someone who hasn't been in a traditional architecture role for a few years. I find the videos to be a bit slow, so I listen to them at 2Xs normal speed. I think the videos could be improved with different reference images/drawings rather than watching the speaker sketch everything out. I tend to fall asleep while reading technical study materials, so the videos were really helpful when I knew I was too tired to read. I used Black Spectacles along with other study materials... it's a very helpful resource, but I definitely needed supplemental materials.

Thank you Black Spectacles, the ressources, especially the exams, have been helpful and helped me pass each exam, combined with the NCARB free exams and googling everything I didn’t understand. It is true the real exams are quite different from the mock exams, whether NCARB or black spectacles. But black spectacles gave me a good exposure and a good start to everything I didn’t know and a directions for my studies, especially with the mock tests, I did not use the videos much. It was helpful in which parts of the building or building codes should I look into and understand the process. There is so much we are supposed to know in architecture, what black spectacles and the exams thought me is that there is too much to know, and it is more about having a general understanding of what we don’t know, whether plumbing, hvac, waste management, stomwater, fire, and so on and applying these principles understood with a good amount of google research.

Great training program! The video lectures and virtual workshops were particularly helpful!!

I'm very happy with this account - I really was looking for something easy to listen to since free time is typically in the car on the way to work or at the gym. I have found most of the content is a good review and I'm given more confidence in just scheduling the exam. I don't have any of the extra content, it is just the basic plan but I find that the course videos is plenty when paired with my work experience. My only complaint is cost- it takes about a month to get through all the videos with a full time + job, it certainly adds up. Not sure if this is anything on you end to consider but even if it was priced per exam it may ease up a bit...cuz the exams definitely add up too ha. It certainly has pushed me to testing -i was more ready than I thought. Thanks!!

I would highly recommend Black Spectacles to any ARE candidate, either as a companion to the more "traditional" study material (Ballast, Amber, etc.), or as a standalone. I myself relied exclusively on Black Spectacles for my preparation and passed all exams on the first attempt. The video format is extremely helpful in staying engaged with the material, and in planning your study sessions - it's helpful to know exactly how long to set aside based on the timestamps of the videos. I also got a lot of useful information by taking the practice tests and reviewing all incorrect answers. These two things combined were the vast majority of my study plan, but the flashcards are useful too and I presume the virtual workshops are great as well - but never attended one. My only criticism is that I would like for the content to be more accessible offline. I would frequently have large blocks of time while flying to job sites across the country where I could have had a very productive study session, but didn't have a good enough connection to stream the videos. I know you can download them via the app, but at least at the time it didn't sync with the dashboard and so I would often end up re-watching videos I had already completed but didn't show up marked as "watched". This issue is very minor, though, and probably only applies to a very small percentage of Black Spectacles users.

It is an awesome method, the only not-so bright-point that I would mention is that in the practice exams the questions are not as deep/complex as the ones you find on the real exams, so you end up filing those too hard. It would be better to add more complexity to the practice exams so you can be really trained for the actual ones.

The teachers and professors are knowledgeable and understandable in terms of teaching.