Final Examination
Construction Project Management
Coverage: the whole book, weighted toward Parts IV, V, and VI. Format: Open book, open notebook, closed device. 150 minutes. Total: 150 points.
Instructor notes
How to subset it.
| Syllabus | Final covers | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 15-week university | The whole course | Parts A, B, C1, C2, C3, D1, D2, E (120 points, 120 min) |
| Two-semester, Semester I | Ch 1–17 | Use the midterm paper at full length |
| Two-semester, Semester II | Ch 18–42 | Parts A(4–8), B(2–5), C2–C4, D, E, F (130 points) |
| Self-paced | Everything, unproctored | The whole paper |
Why open book. Every answer in this book is public. This paper assesses whether a student can do the work with the reference in front of them — which is the condition under which they will do it professionally. Parts C and D carry most of the marks precisely because they cannot be looked up.
Calculators required. No credit in Parts C and D without shown work, even for correct answers.
Part F is oral if you can manage it. Fifteen minutes per student walking their project notebook is the single best assessment instrument in this course. If your class size makes that impossible, the written version below is a reasonable substitute.
PART A — Rapid Definitions (16 points)
One or two sentences each. Precision over length.
A1. (2) Distinguish excusable, non-excusable, compensable, and non-compensable delay.
A2. (2) What is a hold point, and what happens if you miss one?
A3. (2) Define over-billing and state whether it is a good or a bad sign. Justify in one clause.
A4. (2) What is a measured mile and what is it used to prove?
A5. (2) Distinguish substantial completion from a certificate of occupancy, and say who controls each.
A6. (2) What does level of development (LOD) describe, and what does it not describe?
A7. (2) What is percent plan complete (PPC), and why is it scored on a binary basis?
A8. (2) Define fade and explain why a surety looks at it first.
PART B — Short Answer (20 points)
B1. (4) A project reports SPI of 1.02 and is 34 days late on the critical path. Explain precisely how both can be true, and state what instrument you would use instead to answer the schedule question.
B2. (4) Explain why the book claims that cash flow is not profit, and describe the mechanism by which a contractor profitable on every job becomes insolvent.
B3. (4) A superintendent tells you the drywall crew is "about 90% done" on a floor. Explain why this number is nearly useless for both forecasting and billing, and state what you would ask for instead.
B4. (4) The book argues that an acceleration decision is a safety decision. Make the argument in a paragraph, using the mechanism rather than the sentiment.
B5. (4) Explain the difference between a hazard fix and a system fix in an incident investigation, and why an organization that produces only the first will keep having incidents.
PART C — Calculations (52 points)
Show all work.
C1 — Cost control and forecasting (12 points)
A self-perform concrete cost code:
| Budget | $412,000 |
| Budgeted quantity | 1,240 CY |
| Quantity placed to date | 720 CY |
| Cost to date | $268,000 |
(a) (2) Compute the budgeted unit rate and the actual unit rate to date. (b) (3) Forecast the cost to complete using the unit-rate method. (c) (2) Compute the forecast at completion and the variance against budget. (d) (2) Compute the percent complete by quantity and by cost. Explain what the gap between the two tells you. (e) (3) State whether you believe this trend yet, justify the position, and name the three things you investigate first.
C2 — Earned value (12 points)
A work package at the month-8 data date: BAC $840,000 · PV $520,000 · EV $455,000 · AC $511,000.
(a) (3) Compute CV, SV, CPI, and SPI. (b) (4) Compute the estimate at completion by all four standard formulas. State which you would report and why. (c) (2) Compute VAC using your chosen EAC, and TCPI against the original BAC. (d) (3) The project manager insists the job will finish at budget. Use TCPI to evaluate that claim in one sentence, then state the one additional piece of information you would need to know whether the project is going to be late — and explain why EVM cannot supply it.
C3 — Schedule control and acceleration (16 points)
A project is 23 calendar days behind on the critical path. Extended general conditions run $5,150/CD and liquidated damages are $5,500/CD.
Four candidate activities can be compressed:
| Activity | Normal duration | Normal cost | Crash duration | Crash cost | On critical path? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steel erection | 45 | $2,400,000 | 34 | $2,560,000 | Yes | ||
| Deck and topping | 22 | $640,000 | 18 | $712,000 | Yes | ||
| Curtain wall | 60 | $3,100,000 | 52 | $3,340,000 | No (7 days float) | ||
| MEP rough-in L2 | 30 | $1,850,000 | 26 | $1,930,000 | Yes |
(a) (3) Compute the cost slope for each activity. (b) (3) Compress in the correct order to recover as many days as possible. State the order, the days gained at each step, and the cumulative cost. Note where you must stop and why. (c) (3) Compute the cost of simply absorbing all 23 days. (d) (3) Compare and make a recommendation. (e) (4) Your recommendation is adopted. Complete a safety impact review: name three hazards the decision creates, the control required for each, and how you would know in six weeks whether the controls held.
C4 — Payment and cash flow (12 points)
A $6,800,000 lump-sum contract. Retention 5%. Pay application submitted by the 25th; owner pays in 30 days. Subcontractors are paid 7 days after the contractor receives payment. Contractor payroll is weekly.
At pay application #6: work completed and stored previously $2,340,000; this period $610,000.
(a) (3) Compute total completed and stored, retention held, total earned less retention, and the current payment due. (b) (2) Work performed on the 3rd of the month — on approximately what date does the subcontractor who performed it get paid? Show the interval build-up. (c) (3) Compute the general-conditions daily rate given a $680,000 general-conditions budget over a 425-calendar-day contract, and the total daily exposure including liquidated damages of $1,200/CD. (d) (4) The project finishes 19 calendar days late, entirely for reasons within the contractor's control. Compute the total cost of those 19 days, and state what portion of it would still have been incurred had the delay been excusable but non-compensable.
PART D — Applied Judgment (40 points)
D1. (10) The change order. An owner's representative verbally directs additional work on a Thursday. Your assistant superintendent lets the crew build it on Monday. There is no written directive, no agreed price, no time-impact analysis, and no time-and-material tickets for the first four days. Actual cost incurred: $186,400. Cost substantiable with contemporaneous records: $121,000.
(a) State what should have happened on Thursday, Friday, and Monday — three specific actions. (b) Given where you actually are, describe your approach to the negotiation and what you can realistically expect to recover. (c) Name the four procedural changes you would implement so this cannot recur, and say which one does the most work. (d) State the general principle in one sentence.
D2. (10) The delay claim. You are evaluating a claim made against your project by a subcontractor. They assert 31 days of delay and $486,000 in damages. Their monthly schedule updates stopped in month four. Their daily reports read "worked on site" for most of the period. Their notice letters were sent in a batch, after the fact.
(a) Evaluate the claim against each of the three proofs — entitlement, causation, damages — and state where it is strongest and weakest. (b) Which delay analysis methods are available to them, and which are not? Explain why. (c) You believe they were genuinely harmed by your own coordination failures. What do you do, and why is "reject it because they cannot prove it" not obviously the right answer?
D3. (10) The value engineering request. An owner needs $1.8M removed from a project. Your team proposes:
- A different curtain-wall system with equal thermal performance — saves $610,000
- Deferring the third-floor fit-out to a later contract — saves $520,000
- Reducing construction contingency from 3% to 1.5% — saves $340,000
- Substituting a lower-efficiency chiller — saves $180,000 (adds an estimated $27,000/year in energy cost)
- Consolidating two electrical rooms into one — saves $150,000
(a) Classify each as genuine value engineering or something else, with reasoning. (b) For item 4, compute the simple payback and state whether you would recommend it, and to whom the decision actually belongs. (c) Identify the item you would refuse to present, and explain why refusing serves the owner. (d) You are $0 short after removing only the legitimate items. What do you tell the owner?
D4. (10) The bid decision. Your firm has $72M of backlog against a $150M aggregate bonding program and a $60M single-project limit. Your two best superintendents are committed for eleven more months. A $58M hospital project is bidding in six weeks for a client you have never worked for, whose documents are at 75% completion, with a no-damage-for-delay clause and liquidated damages of $12,000/CD.
State your recommendation and defend it. Your answer must address bonding, staffing, document risk, contract terms, and the strategic argument for bidding anyway — and must name the single factor you would treat as a knockout.
PART E — Synthesis (12 points)
Choose ONE. Roughly one and a half pages.
E1. The book identifies fifteen threshold concepts. Choose three from three different parts of the book. For each: state it in your own words, give an example that is not the book's, and describe what someone who has not grasped it believes instead. Then argue which of the three is most consequential for a first-year project engineer.
E2. Trace a single failure through the entire book. Pick one of the book's recurring incidents — the 23-day steel delay, the change order built before it was priced, or the scaffold near-miss — and follow it across at least five chapters, showing how the same event is a different discipline's problem in each. Then state what a single manager could have done, and when, to prevent it.
E3. The book claims that most technical failures in construction are communication failures wearing a technical costume. Test that claim: make the strongest case for it using specific evidence from the book, then make the strongest case against it. Reach a conclusion.
PART F — The Project Notebook Defense (10 points)
Oral if possible; written if not.
Present your Willow Street project notebook. In fifteen minutes:
- Walk the project from bid to closeout in five minutes.
- Show the three artifacts you would put in front of a hiring manager, and say why those three.
- Answer: "Why is this number what it is?" for any figure the examiner selects.
- State the single largest weakness in your own notebook and how you would fix it with another week.
Written substitute: a two-page executive summary of the project, plus a one-page annotated index of the notebook identifying the three strongest deliverables and the one weakest, with reasoning.
Marking: 4 points for the walkthrough's coherence, 3 for defending a selected number, 3 for the honesty and accuracy of the self-assessment. Award the self-assessment points generously for genuine critique and not at all for false modesty or for claiming everything is fine.
Answer Key and Marking Notes
Instructor answer key
Part A
- A1. Excusable = contractor gets more time. Compensable = contractor also gets money. The two axes are independent: unusually severe weather is typically excusable but non-compensable; an owner-directed change is both; a subcontractor default is neither.
- A2. A point at which work stops until the inspection is performed and released. Missing one means either uncovering the work or accepting it without verification — often at the design professional's discretion and usually with a credit.
- A3. Billings in excess of costs and estimated earnings. Normal and often healthy — the contractor is financing the job with the owner's money rather than its own. Excessive overbilling is a warning: it borrows cash from work not yet performed, and it reverses.
- A4. A comparison of productivity in an unimpacted period against an impacted one on the same work, used to prove lost productivity / disruption damages. It is preferred because it uses the project's own data rather than an industry table.
- A5. Substantial completion: the owner can occupy or use the work for its intended purpose — a determination, typically by the architect with the owner. Certificate of occupancy: the AHJ's permission to occupy. Neither party to the contract controls the second.
- A6. How much you may rely on an element — its reliability for quantity extraction, coordination, and clearance. It does not describe visual detail; a beautifully rendered element can be at a low LOD.
- A7. Commitments completed ÷ commitments made. Binary because a handoff that is 90% complete is zero handoffs — the successor still cannot start.
- A8. The reduction in a job's estimated gross profit from one period to the next. Sureties look at it first because it reveals the quality of a company's forecasting culture, which predicts future surprises better than any current ratio.
Part B — marking guidance
- B1. (4) SV and SPI are denominated in dollars, not days, and are indifferent to the critical path. Completing non-critical work early raises EV without advancing the project; a front-loaded SOV inflates EV further; level-of-effort activities dilute the index toward 1.0. The CPM schedule is the instrument for the schedule question. Full credit requires naming at least two mechanisms.
- B2. (4) Growth consumes cash before it produces it; retention is held; changes are performed before approval; subcontractors are paid faster than the owner pays. Overbilling masks the gap until those jobs end and it reverses. Credit for the sequence, not just the assertion.
- B3. (4) "About 90%" is a supervisor's judgment with a known optimistic bias, and the last 10% of most activities carries a disproportionate share of the remaining effort. Ask for quantity installed against quantity budgeted, measured in the same units as the estimate.
- B4. (4) Must contain the mechanism: acceleration produces overtime and fatigue, added crews and trade stacking, out-of-sequence work, and pressure that changes what crews will tolerate — each of which is a hazard-generating condition. Credit the causal chain, not the sentiment.
- B5. (4) A hazard fix removes the specific hazard (re-secure the plank, re-tag the scaffold). A system fix changes what produced it (a modification-control procedure; a safety impact review on acceleration decisions). Only the second changes the rate; the first resets the clock.
Part C1
- (a) Budgeted $412,000 ÷ 1,240 = $332.26/CY. Actual $268,000 ÷ 720 = $372.22/CY
- (b) Remaining 520 CY × $372.22 = $193,554
- (c) FAC = 268,000 + 193,554 = $461,554. Variance = 412,000 − 461,554 = ($49,554) unfavorable
- (d) By quantity 720 ÷ 1,240 = 58.1%. By cost 268,000 ÷ 412,000 = 65.0%. Cost is running ahead of production — the classic productivity-overrun signature.
- (e) Yes, believe it: 58% complete is well past the threshold at which a unit rate becomes predictive. Investigate: crew composition and size, access or sequence problems (out-of-sequence or congested work), and whether the scope has changed without a change order. Credit any three defensible items with reasoning.
Part C2
- (a) CV = 455,000 − 511,000 = ($56,000). SV = 455,000 − 520,000 = ($65,000). CPI = 455,000 ÷ 511,000 = 0.890. SPI = 455,000 ÷ 520,000 = 0.875
- (b) EAC₁ = BAC ÷ CPI = 840,000 ÷ 0.890 = $943,820 EAC₂ = AC + (BAC − EV) = 511,000 + 385,000 = $896,000 EAC₃ = AC + [(BAC − EV) ÷ (CPI × SPI)] = 511,000 + [385,000 ÷ 0.7788] = $1,005,364 EAC₄ = AC + bottom-up ETC (requires a re-estimate; state the method) Report EAC₁ as the default — current performance continuing is the honest baseline assumption. EAC₂ assumes the overrun was a one-time event, which requires evidence.
- (c) VAC = 840,000 − 943,820 = ($103,820). TCPI = (BAC − EV) ÷ (BAC − AC) = 385,000 ÷ 329,000 = 1.170
- (d) The remaining work would have to run at 1.170 against a demonstrated 0.890 — a 31% improvement with no stated cause. That is a wish, not a forecast. The missing information is the CPM schedule: SPI of 0.875 is a dollar measure and says nothing about the critical path, so the job could be on time with non-critical work behind, or on-index and badly late.
Part C3
- (a) Steel: (2,560,000 − 2,400,000) ÷ (45 − 34) = 160,000 ÷ 11 = $14,545/day Deck: (712,000 − 640,000) ÷ 4 = $18,000/day Curtain wall: (3,340,000 − 3,100,000) ÷ 8 = $30,000/day — and it is not on the critical path, so crashing it buys nothing. MEP L2: (1,930,000 − 1,850,000) ÷ 4 = $20,000/day
- (b) Crash only critical activities, cheapest slope first: steel 11 days @ $14,545 = $160,000 (cumulative 11 days, $160,000); deck 4 days @ $18,000 = $72,000 (15 days, $232,000); MEP L2 4 days @ $20,000 = $80,000 (19 days, $312,000). You stop at 19 days — the remaining candidate is non-critical. Also credit any student who notes that the critical path must be recalculated after each step and may shift, potentially bringing the curtain wall onto it after 7 days are consumed.
- (c) 23 × (5,150 + 5,500) = 23 × 10,650 = $244,950
- (d) Crash 19 days for $312,000, leaving 4 days at $10,650 = $42,600, total $354,600 — which is worse than absorbing at $244,950. The correct recommendation is to absorb, or to crash only the steel (11 days for $160,000, plus 12 residual days at $10,650 = $127,800, total $287,800 — still worse than absorbing). Full credit requires recognizing that acceleration here does not pay and stating what non-financial factor would have to exist to change the answer (a hard owner deadline, a lease expiration, a seasonal constraint).
- (e) Any three defensible hazards with controls and a verification method: trade stacking and congestion → area-by-area sequencing and a manpower cap per zone; fatigue from premium time → hour limits and a rotation; out-of-sequence work → revised JHAs for the changed sequence. Verification must be a leading indicator (near-miss reporting rate, pre-task plan completion, inspection findings), not the recordable rate.
Part C4
- (a) Total completed and stored = 2,340,000 + 610,000 = $2,950,000. Retention @ 5% = $147,500. Total earned less retention = $2,802,500. Previously paid (less retention) = 2,340,000 × 0.95 = $2,223,000. Current payment due = $579,500.
- (b) Work on the 3rd → falls in a period ending roughly the 25th (22 days) → owner pays 30 days later (55 days) → subcontractor paid 7 days after that = approximately 62 days. Accept 60–65 with a shown build-up.
- (c) 680,000 ÷ 425 = $1,600.00/CD. Total exposure = 1,600 + 1,200 = $2,800/CD
- (d) 19 × 2,800 = $53,200. Had the delay been excusable but non-compensable, the contractor would receive a time extension — so liquidated damages would not apply, but the contractor would still absorb its own extended general conditions: 19 × 1,600 = $30,400. (This part separates students who understand the two-axis delay taxonomy from those who memorized it.)
Parts D, E, F — marking guidance
Assess reasoning, not conclusions. Award the top band only where the student engages with the strongest version of the opposing position. For D2(c), the answer that earns full credit recognizes that rejecting a claim you believe is meritorious because the claimant cannot prove it is legally available, commercially short-sighted, and professionally corrosive — and that the relationship, the subcontractor's future pricing, and your own reputation in a small market are all consideration. For D3(c), the refusal is item 3: letting an owner "save" money by deleting the reserve for identified risk does the owner harm and is not a saving at all.
For E, a student who cannot state the strongest version of the view they reject has not earned the top band.
Point distribution
| Part | Topic | Points |
|---|---|---|
| A | Rapid definitions | 16 |
| B | Short answer | 20 |
| C | Calculations | 52 |
| D | Applied judgment | 40 |
| E | Synthesis | 12 |
| F | Notebook defense | 10 |
| Total | 150 |
Suggested bands: 135+ exceptional · 120–134 strong · 105–119 solid · 90–104 proficient with identifiable gaps · below 90 revisit Chapters 14, 28, and 33, in that order.