EET - SE Review Course Homework

For anyone who has taken the EET - SE Review Courses (vertical and/or lateral), how much homework is there each week on average?  I am hesitantly considering taking both the vertical and lateral review courses at the same time, but, working full-time, I am afraid I won't have enough hours in the week to do all the homework.  Any insight would be greatly appreciated!  Thank you!

-Tom 

@TehMightyEngineer, what course do you teach and do you assign homework?

I teach one of PPI's 16-hour SE review course with another instructor. David Connor here on the forum also teaches the other PPI SE review course with another instructor. This is actually the first I've heard of EET but it appears to be a solid course just judging from the info on their website and their course layout. They seem to offer a lot of contact hours with the instructors and I imagine they use that time to run a lot of problems during their lectures.

PPI's approach is slightly different than EET from what I can tell. We've set it up as more of a focused, refresher-course approach where we cover a large breadth of the SE exam quickly without diving as much into working complicated problems during the lectures. Our contact hours are fewer than EET (though 70 hours isn't skimping in my mind) but we include a lot of commonly used PPI texts in the course so I think you're not losing value in my mind (and probably gain some if you ask me, as a lot of the PPI references are highly recommended for the SE exam). To answer your question SE_FL, as we don't dive too much into the more complicated example problems we assign a large amount of homework problems for people to run though. While this isn't any less homework than is recommended by most people who passed the SE exam, it can be quite daunting.

I guess you could say that if you want the most bang-for-your-buck (and a bunch of awesome instructors who are active on engineering forums ) then choose PPI.  If you want more live instructor contact and need a little more of a helping hand or don't want to spend as much time running homework problems by yourself then EET seems to have a decent value.

I guess to answer @TCurrz1016's question; I'd plan on spending at least 150 hours per course on homework (300 total). Divide that by the weeks the course runs and you have a decent idea of the homework hours you'll need to be able to put in. This does not include the time for the course; so add in the hours you'll spend watching lectures. If you can't fit all this time in your schedule then I'd say taking one course at a time may be the way to go.

I took the EET course for the SE Lateral Exam. 

Not being from the CA area, I took the live webinar course every Saturday for 12 weeks (I believe?) which was an all day commitment of approximately 8 hours. 

Homework was probably about 4-6 hours of actual work time.  There was also a few hours on Tuesdays that the instructors were available for questions, go over home work, or to finish the topic from the previous Saturday lecture.   Two weeks prior to the actual SE exam, they give a simulated exam which is graded.  This helped me a lot, I knew what topics I had to improve on for the exam.  Both the instructors where very helpful and available for questions and help when I needed it.

Overall, the course was great for me and helped me finally pass the test.

My only regret was not taking a course sooner than later, either way you have to put in the time study to pass the test.

I would have taken PPI course but sadly they do not offer Lateral only course. I have already taken Vertical exam and I wanted to take the Lateral class since I do not have a very good working experience with lateral. EET course looks good and they offer Vertical and Lateral separately so I think I will just take that. I have skimmed through other topics in the forum and found that PPI was the most suggested course. Anyone know of any other courses?

crammer said:

I would have taken PPI course but sadly they do not offer Lateral only course. I have already taken Vertical exam and I wanted to take the Lateral class since I do not have a very good working experience with lateral. EET course looks good and they offer Vertical and Lateral separately so I think I will just take that. I have skimmed through other topics in the forum and found that PPI was the most suggested course. Anyone know of any other courses?

Click to expand...

We actually used to offer a lateral-only course but found that too many vertical topics included information pertinent to the lateral exam and ended up being part of the lateral course anyway. For example, things like wood connections, steel beam and column design, concrete flexure and shear design, retaining walls, piles, general analysis, methods such as moment distribution, and so on are all topics that have aspects related to both vertical and lateral. Plus, any general exam topics we discuss in the vertical lectures would need to get repeated for the lateral only people.

We only just eliminated the lateral-only course this fall, but have gotten some feedback that some people didn't like this if they already passed vertical, but it was mostly for homework reasons. We're probably going to keep it as is unless we get a lot of feedback that a dedicated lateral only course is highly requested.

The other option would be to have a lateral only course with the understanding that you might be missing out on the basics but I'm not sure PPI would include their passing guarantee with this and it would require rearranging our lectures a bit. Overall it's probably not the best way for us to go with how PPI has set the course up.

Annoyingly it's almost impossible to please everyone with an SE exam review course as some people need vertical only, some people need lateral only, some need bridge focus, etc.

TehMightyEngineer said:

We actually used to offer a lateral-only course but found that too many vertical topics included information pertinent to the lateral exam and ended up being part of the lateral course anyway. For example, things like wood connections, steel beam and column design, concrete flexure and shear design, retaining walls, piles, general analysis, methods such as moment distribution, and so on are all topics that have aspects related to both vertical and lateral. Plus, any general exam topics we discuss in the vertical lectures would need to get repeated for the lateral only people.

We only just eliminated the lateral-only course this fall, but have gotten some feedback that some people didn't like this if they already passed vertical, but it was mostly for homework reasons. We're probably going to keep it as is unless we get a lot of feedback that a dedicated lateral only course is highly requested.

The other option would be to have a lateral only course with the understanding that you might be missing out on the basics but I'm not sure PPI would include their passing guarantee with this and it would require rearranging our lectures a bit. Overall it's probably not the best way for us to go with how PPI has set the course up.

Annoyingly it's almost impossible to please everyone with an SE exam review course as some people need vertical only, some people need lateral only, some need bridge focus, etc.

Click to expand...

I understand your side of the story. If I were to go back, I would give myself the advise to take both the courses that way I would have had more practice in the vertical exam and have the notes for the lateral exam as well. Do let us know if things change in a few weeks time and you offer the lateral only course.