6 Tips and Tricks to Help You Ace the NCIDQ Exam

Jan 23, 2025 By Nneka McGuire

Julianne Peters on how to prep productively, feel more comfortable on test day, and, most importantly, pass the NCIDQ

By Nneka McGuire Jan 23, 2025

Published in Programs

Few people look forward to tests — except maybe the moment when you’re done with them — but for many designers, the NCIDQ exam is a fact of life. Administered by the Council for Interior Design Qualification (CIDQ), the three-part NCIDQ exam is required to earn NCIDQ certification, a mark of professional expertise in interior design, proof that designers have a comprehensive understanding of how to protect and promote public health, safety, and welfare. Certification isn’t just a career-booster; in many states, it’s a prerequisite for interior designers to become licensed or registered and gain independent practice rights.

Julianne Peters, IIDA, an interior designer at Stantec in Philadelphia and founder of Design Success Network, which offers NCIDQ exam prep tutoring and other resources, partnered with IIDA to offer an in-depth NCIDQ test prep series that covers all three parts of the exam — Fundamentals, Professional, and Practicum — as well as general test-taking strategies.

No question, the NCIDQ exam is tough. Fall 2024 pass rates were 53% for Fundamentals, 56% for Professional, and 69% for the Practicum — which is exactly why dedicated studying and support is crucial to success.

Below, Peters shares six NCIDQ exam tips and tactics. No one size fits all, she notes; everyone studies differently and has unique experiences and knowledge. Still, these strategies should help you prep productively, feel more comfortable on test day, and, most importantly, pass.

If you’re finishing your studies, go ahead and take the Fundamentals exam.

“The best recommendation I can give is if you are a senior in college or in grad school, or a recent graduate, take the Fundamentals exam and just get it out of the way,” Peters says. “As a recent grad, you can take that without collecting work experience. You’re already in study mode coming out of school.”

Get it done, Peters urges. That way, later on, once you’ve acquired the required work experience to proceed to subsequent parts of the exam, you’ll just have two tests to go — Professional and Practicum.

Familiarize yourself with the software — especially for the Practicum exam.

Prep isn’t just about understanding exam content, it’s also essential to understand how to use the software. CIDQ has a video that explains how the Practicum software works; it also touches on the multiple-choice format of the other exams. She recommends you watch it about five times. “The last thing you want to do is show up the day of, either at the testing center or doing it remotely, and have no idea what you’re going to look at,” she says.

The exam software has “helpful tools like being able to flag a question, highlighting text, striking text out. When you take the Practicum, there are also different exhibits and reference materials that you can open.”

Exploring the software is one thing Peters didn’t do ahead of taking the NCIDQ exam herself, and if she could go back in time, she’d change that. “When you’re sitting down to take an exam like this, it’s not cheap. It’s important for your career. There’s a lot at stake. Do everything you can to make sure you’re going to go in and be comfortable.”

Tap into the collective knowledge of friends and colleagues.

One tactic Peters found helpful? Staying up-to-date. “Even when I wasn’t actively studying to take the exam, I just kept an ear out for NCIDQ information. Any of my friends or colleagues who were taking the exam, I talked to them about it,” she says. When she was studying to take the exam herself, she talked to them about it even more.

“I had folks who shared their study notes with me. They would send me a link to a Google Doc that was 20 pages long, and they were like, ‘This is what I felt was really important.’ So I was able to crowdsource a lot of information, which was very helpful. The more comfortable I was talking about it, the more comfortable I knew I would be on test day.”

Talking through these topics helps, because memorization alone won’t help you pass the exam, Peters says. “You have to actually know how to use what you’re learning.” It’s wise to apply exam topics at work, too. “I used to schedule time with my supervisors, and I would say, ‘I’m studying this ethical dilemma. Have you ever encountered that before?’ A conversation I would have with them would help me be able to better apply that information, understand it, as opposed to just memorizing it.”

When collecting study materials, be discerning.

Crowdsourced information is helpful, but it isn’t always accurate. “Be aware of Facebook groups or Instagram accounts, people who are sharing study materials online,” Peters says. “We’re all human. We all make mistakes and sometimes things aren’t right. There are no official study materials for this exam, absolutely zero, including the interior design reference manual that I recommend everyone buy. It’s not official. It's the best thing we have, but it’s not official.”

As the founder of an exam prep company, Peters holds herself accountable in all her classes. “I invite people to challenge me. Let’s look up the reasoning to this answer together,” she might say, “just in case I’m wrong.” But Instagram accounts or Facebook groups, even from those who are well-intentioned, don’t necessarily have the same rigorous checks and balances.

Assemble your “pit crew.”

It’s common to spend about six months studying for the exam. During that period, “you can’t just rely on one person who’s going to be your cheerleader,” Peters says. While cheerleaders are indeed essential — she calls out her girlfriend, who took over nightly dinner while Peters studied to take the exam — you need a team. Have a study group, an accountability buddy, a mentor, people who can cook dinner or take on extra chores when you’re studying intensely (“that unseen labor takes a lot of time”). In essence, gather your people — friends, family, partners — and let them support you.

Don’t obsess over your score. Seriously.

Peters took the hard route, or as she puts it, “I chose to rip off the Band-Aid and take all three exams at once. It’s not something that I recommend, because it was emotionally and mentally very challenging,” she says with a chuckle. Still, it worked. She passed — “by the skin of my teeth on some of those exams. I passed by only a few points, but as I tell my design students now, no one’s going to ask you what your score is. You pass or you don’t.”