Duke

I appreciate an opinion from the other side. I agree that the reality is not many people would want someone who can't say they have professional licensure to act as an EOR on their project. But to call yourself an SE all you have to do is "demonstrate competence" and pass the exam, there is no metric for passion. I'm pretty confident that most SE's would agree, that the current SE exams are in a league of their own when it comes to testing. The difficulty is far beyond any college course I personally have taken. I don't think watering down the content is the solution either. IMO speed is just too much of a factor on the exam. And TBH it is a competence test, fairness to past test takers either way shouldn't play a role in what should be required for competence. I've been a part of peer reviewing some pretty scary calculation sets from SE's and I'm not going to complain that in the way back when it was easier to get the SE license. I don't have a good answer on how to improve the exam, but I would happily settle for it being offered every 3 months and it costing half as much. The high price tag and NCEES's closed doors policy on this exam really has a bad faith feel to me. I agree, best of luck.

This exam is unfair to those of us who are competent but have not been blessed with speed in the traditional test format. Otherwise competent engineers who perform well in the real world are held back from licensure if they aren't predisposed to performing material they saw once or twice in some form on a practice exam and then on the exam have to run design calcs on it at break neck speed. Then comparing the SE to other high stakes professions the pass rates don't even compare. I believe the people passing the current SE are competent, and that is a good thing, but I also believe many competent engineers struggle with this exam which very negatively impacts would be SE's career paths, which is a bad thing.

/ huh, who left this soap box here... looks stable enough, stands on it. As someone who has yet to prove his competence I'm not going to complain about the difficulty of the SE. But to make a test this difficult and charge $400/$800 per try and only offer it once every 6 months is what bothers me. A couple swings and misses and some tough luck costs would be professional engineers years on their career. IMO this exam should cost half as much and be offered twice as often. / gets off soap box

From what I've seen it takes 30/40 morning and A/A/IR/IR in the afternoon to pass. They are combined, failing morning or afternoon fails both.

@ Hindianapolis I felt "ok" on the vertical afternoon but the morning is what burned me. I hit a wall on too many of the AASHTO questions and a couple others. @ cal91 Unless you are a very gifted test taker and got high scores on very difficult tests in the past I would recommend taking them separately. I tried taking both and it didn't work for two reasons. 1) I ended up being spread too thin in my studies trying to make up knowledge gaps in both areas. 2) The last three hours on the second day are very challenging due to burn out. That being said people do make it in one go, but most of us don't.

PPI was bought by another company so this may be a result of that. I have the STERM 9th first printing and I created a support ticket a month ago complaining about not having any posted errata, they send me the 2nd printing for free and said it was the best they could do. I'd answer your question but I don't have it on me, can update later. I can confirm.... No changes between the first and second printings were made on page 9-6