SE Practice Exams

[DaveEng]

Wondering if anyone has taken PPI 16-Hour SE Practice Exam for Buildings? I have gone over it and the NCEES sample questions & solutions. I found PPI much more difficult and time consuming, especially how involved the bridge questions were. I was able to work the problems (except the bridge questions) but found myself struggling for time. Just wondering if anyone had thoughts or similar experience.

 

[darius]

I have left both practice exam for the last with the intention to test myself when all the study is over. I can't answer the question now, but will be interesting to find some feedback on your question. Based on what others said, I believe that NCEES practice exam is the closest representation of the real exam.

 

[phecke]

I'd say do a practice exam NOW if you haven't already. If there's something you aren't very strong on or forgot to study the practice exam will expose it. It's much better to find out now than trying to learn or brush up on something a week before the test.

That being said, I only used the NCEES exam study book/test and I thought it was very representative of the difficulty, type, and subject matter you WILL see. (Seriously, you WILL see the subject matter and individual types of problem that are in that book, plus some others) The NCEES book also has the worked solutions in it, which shows NCEES line of thinking for answers and is what they will be looking for in both the morning and afternoon sessions. What I mean by this is that I had a way of solving certain problems that gave me slightly different answers than were on the multiple choice questions. Not different enough to be wrong in the real world, but for example, when your answer is 550 k-ft and the choices are 480, 540, 568, and 600, which one is correct? Knowing their method eliminates this problem.

So, work the NCEES problems and be sure you know how they want you to solve them. Just for reference, I worked every problem in that book probably 3 times, and made notes on things in the code and things to watch out for as I did every time.

 

[WSU_Coug]

I had the same experience with the PPI practice exam vs NCEES. I did practice timed exams with both and was pretty disheartened at the end of the PPI exam when I didn't have enough time to finish and got quite a few wrong answers when I went back and checked my results. BUT - I think this probably helped me the most with my studying. I found out where my problem areas were and also honed my method solving problems quickly and referencing what's relevant for the essay portion.

I started doing to the practice exams about a month before the real thing last April. In hindsight, I probably would have started doing the practice tests even earlier because it was a good assessment tool. I also found it incredibly helpful to see where I made silly mistakes when pressed for time so I could be more cognizant of these things in the real test.

 

[TJM]

Dave,

I also took the PPI practice test pretty close to when I took the real exam this past spring.

I don't remember my exact score on the practice exam, but I do remember being VERY discouraged by the result. On the practice exam, I completely ran out of time on the afternoon and didn't do nearly as well as I would have liked in the morning portions. A few weeks later, I passed both sections.

From my experience, the difficulty level, and content type, of the practice exam problems is on par with the difficulty level of the toughest problems on the real exam, however, it seemed to me like there were quite a few moderately easy and even a few "gimme" type problems on the real exam. Because of this, the amount of time I needed for the practice exam was not a good indicator of preparedness for me.

Bottom line - don't get discouraged by the amount of time you needed to finish the PPI practice exam, but do be sure that you're knowledge level is acceptable on all the areas that are stressed on the practice exam.

Misc piece of advice: Start in the AASHTO index for the bridge problems.

Good luck!

-TJ

 

[DaveEng]

Great feedback. Thanks!

 

[TehMightyEngineer]

I agree with phecke about not waiting until the very last minute if this is your first time. Give yourself at least a week or so to brush up on the weaker areas the exam reveals. I'd actually do at least one problem from the afternoon right now just to see if your speed of solving the problem is good enough.