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07-Str-B2: May 2016

Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)

  1. Question 1 Scheduling — critical path, total floats, and the effect of delaying E
  2. Question 2 Contract Administration — bid unbalancing and public-sector award criteria
  3. Question 3 Estimating and Bidding — indirect-cost classification and the total-indirect-cost equation
  4. Question 4 Engineering Economics — present-worth comparison of two projects with unequal lives
  5. Question 5 Safety Practices and Regulations — eight measures across highway and building work
  6. Question 6 Project Control — S-curves and progress measurement from a bar chart

Start with Question 1 →

Paper format: National Exams, May 2016 — 07-Str-B2 Management of Construction. Three hours, closed book, one approved Casio or Sharp calculator permitted. Six questions of equal value (20 marks each); any five constitute a complete paper and only the first five answered are marked. All six are worked below so that the paper can be used for revision whichever five a candidate chooses.

Reference texts: Hegazy, T., Computer-Based Construction Project Management (Prentice Hall) — precedence networks with lags, total and free float, project overhead versus general overhead, and the bar-chart/S-curve control method behind Questions 1, 3 and 6; Hendrickson, C. & Au, T., Project Management for Construction (2nd ed., Carnegie Mellon) — Chapters 5 (cost estimation), 10 (scheduling) and 12 (cost control, monitoring and accounting), the source of the earned-value quantities used in Question 6; Halpin, D.W. & Senior, B.A., Construction Management (4th ed., Wiley) — competitive bidding, unbalanced bids, indirect-cost structure and construction safety; Sullivan, W.G., Wicks, E.M. & Koelling, C.P., Engineering Economy (17th ed., Pearson) — Chapters 5 and 6, present-worth analysis and the repeatability assumption for alternatives with unequal lives, used in Question 4; Peurifoy, R.L. & Oberlender, G.D., Estimating Construction Costs (6th ed., McGraw-Hill) — job overhead versus general overhead; Canadian Construction Documents Committee, CCDC 2 — Stipulated Price Contract (2020) and CCDC 23 — A Guide to Calling Bids and Awarding Contracts — bid-call practice, bid security and award criteria for Question 2; Ron Engineering (M.J.B. Enterprises line of cases) as summarised in Goldsmith, I. & Heintzman, T.G., Goldsmith on Canadian Building Contracts (5th ed., Thomson Reuters) — the Contract A/Contract B doctrine that governs a Canadian public bid call; WorkSafeBC, Occupational Health and Safety Regulation (Parts 4, 8, 11, 13, 18, 19 and 20) and the BC Workers Compensation Act, together with CSA Z259 (fall protection), CSA Z94.4 (respirators) and CSA W117.2 (welding safety) — the Canadian rule set behind Question 5.

Question 1 (network). Every activity letter and duration is printed inside its box and reads cleanly. The link routing was traced at high magnification: Start feeds A, D and G; a riser from the right edge of D feeds B; the horizontal link D → E carries the only labelled lag on the sheet, FS 6; a riser from the right edge of G feeds E; G also feeds H, H feeds I, A feeds B, B feeds C, E feeds F; and C, F and I terminate at End. Every unlabelled arrow is an ordinary finish-to-start link with zero lag, which is the only reading consistent with the drawing.

Question 6 (bar chart). Every percentage label falls on a week boundary, so the printed figures are cumulative percent complete at each week end. Planned: A 20/60/100 in weeks 1–3; B 10/80 in weeks 1–2, finishing in week 3; C 20/70 in weeks 3–4, finishing in week 5. Actual: A 10/50/90 in weeks 1–3, its bar closing in week 4; B 70 at week 2, its bar closing in week 3; C 50 at week 3, its bar closing exactly on the week-4 gridline. A bar that closes is read as 100 % complete from that week end onward, which is the standard convention and the only reading that lets part (c) be answered at all.