Advice for Electronics

Hello!

I am studying the electronics exam. Hope you can give some advice.

I didn't learn magnetic field theory before and find it hard to learn in a short time. I was not good at electronic device, either (BJT, FET, small signal analysis). These two take 21% of the exam. If I give them up, and focus on other topics, is it a bad idea?

It is hard to stay focused when I think it might not appear in the exam. Should I just focus on studying the CAMARA manual? Will that make me know 50% of the knowledge necessary?

How to study for the measurement and safety part?

Do I need some CODE book for this exam?

I am an April 2014 Electronics PE Exam passer, first try. The Magnetic Field theory stuff seemed to be as simple as plugging the numbers into the right formulas. I think all the formulas I needed for this area were in the Camara manual and the NCEES FE Reference Handbook. Know when to use which formula. Transistors sucked for me. It was definitely my Achilles heel more than anything else, and I should have studied them harder. There will be several problems on the exam for FET and BJT transistors so don't skip them! Find some books and do as many practice problems as you can. Know what a signal does throughout the circuit, where the current is going, the voltages at each junction, etc.

The Camara manual for the Electronics exam does cover about half of the exam, but don't rely solely on it! Get some additional references, especially for Communications (RF, antennas, etc.), there are quite a few of these problems on the exam.

I couldn't find a good book on Measurement and Safety. The problems in the NCEES practice exam on this topic weren't in the Camara manual from what I recall. I ended up Googling up a bunch of web pages on those topics based on the NCEES practice exam and hole-punching them into by big binder.

You do NOT need the NEC, NESC, or any other code book for the Electrical & Electronics exam. You also don't need to worry about Engineering Economics. There was not a single questions from any of these on the April 2014 exam, and if you search other threads in this forum it can be confirm that the same goes from previous examinations.

Thanks, sChris! Those are really good suggestions.

Before you lull yourself into a state of complacency, go to NCEES.org and review the elements of examination for this examination. That will tell you what is on the test and what proportion of the exam is devoted to each topic.

I would NOT skip any part of the exam. If you blow off 20% of the exam, then the best you can do, assuming that you got all of the other questions correct is 80%. Your probability of success is exponentially smaller using that goofy logic. Get the books, study the material and then hit it hard. If you graduated from an ABET accredited engineering program, you should have had all of this material.

Good Luck!

I will also add this: Go through the NCEES practice problems and note the problems that you cannot answer with just the Camara manual. There will be many more problems like this on the actual exam! The topics from which those problems come are the ones you will need an additional reference for.

I found Camara and NCEES practice sets sufficient for electricity and magnetism stuff, electrostatics, circuits, controls, logic gates, math stuff (i.e. Fourier transforms/analysis/signals/series), and a few other topics. I knew after going through the NCEES practice problems that I needed additional material for measurement, computer and software stuff, communications and antennas, some electronics, and maybe a few others.

As was said before, don't skip any topics.