OCTOBER 2017 PE EXAM

namod65 said:

I took HVAC and I think I did pretty well. Skipped one question in the morning, and skipped one in the afternoon. Answered all the "general knowledge" questions that didn't require any calculation, but circled a few to come back and revisit. Finished both sessions with over an hour left and had plenty of time to revisit the ones I circled. Only 2 questions out of the 80 I didn't arrive at an answer that was one of the four choices. So here's to hoping I didn't get "tricked" 15 to 20 times lol.

I thought the NCEES practice tests were a good representation of the exam. Now of course the questions didn't ask you the same exact things the practice exam did, but if you actually knew the topics well, and not just memorize how to solve the practice exam, then you could easy figure out that they're asking you something slightly different and you need this variable instead of this one, etc...

I'll post a lengthy review of my study process and what were the best review materials in the main thread once I get confirmation that I passed. Fingers still crossed until then lol.

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enfinity said:

I took the TFS exam on friday.

Obviously we can't go into specifics, but I felt that I did way poorer than I thought I would.  I had a false sense of security from the NCEES official practice exam for TFS, which I was able to smoke easily and finished super early in my practice runs.  Maybe I had just gotten used to those types of problems, that's probably my fault.

For the actual exam, again not being specific, but I felt there were a decent number of problems that were unexpected to show up.  They seemed more "peripheral" to TFS to me, and instead popped up a decent amount.  Even the easy "gimme" questions weren't as gimme as the practice exams.

I probably answered 52 questions with confidence (probably got 90% of those correct, the ones being wrong being something stupid).  I did "educated guessing" on about 10 questions (probably hit 40-50% of those), and then complete random guessing on 18 questions due to time constraints (25% by standard chance).  That is really not good.  I'm hoping for a low cut score.

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Feras said:

I also felt almost exactly the same way about TFS.  I did not feel good about the afternoon session at all and thought it was just me.  Thank you all for sharing your stories!  Hope we all pass!  Wishing everyone all the best! 

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enfinity said:

I took the TFS exam on friday.

Obviously we can't go into specifics, but I felt that I did way poorer than I thought I would.  I had a false sense of security from the NCEES official practice exam for TFS, which I was able to smoke easily and finished super early in my practice runs.  Maybe I had just gotten used to those types of problems, that's probably my fault.

For the actual exam, again not being specific, but I felt there were a decent number of problems that were unexpected to show up.  They seemed more "peripheral" to TFS to me, and instead popped up a decent amount.  Even the easy "gimme" questions weren't as gimme as the practice exams.

I probably answered 52 questions with confidence (probably got 90% of those correct, the ones being wrong being something stupid).  I did "educated guessing" on about 10 questions (probably hit 40-50% of those), and then complete random guessing on 18 questions due to time constraints (25% by standard chance).  That is really not good.  I'm hoping for a low cut score.

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Feras said:

I had a very similar experience, the exam had couple of questions that you didn't expect to see in TFS.  The morning session was easier than the afternoon one.  A good part of the exam was something relatively similar to the NCEES newest practice exam (with a bit of tweaking).  

The exam was harder than I was looking for.  Wating for the results

All the best to you all! 

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EngineerGirlPE said:

I also felt almost exactly the same way about TFS.  I did not feel good about the afternoon session at all and thought it was just me.  Thank you all for sharing your stories!  Hope we all pass!  Wishing everyone all the best! 

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sbrookef said:

This past Friday, I took MDM. Morning for me was easier than afternoon (blindly guessed on about 3-4 questions). Afternoon exam I think I had more time management issues, or perhaps the questions were harder, and I wound up guessing on about 5 of the problems (some were educated guesses). Even though the pass rate for the exam is 75%, for instance, I was not under the impression you needed a 75% of the questions right to pass. I thought that proctors or PEs of some sort took the PE exam and then questions that were "unfair" got thrown out. I thought I also read on this forum that people that got around 50 or 55 questions right had passed, and that is certainly not a raw score of 75%. In any case, no matter how the grading is, we all won't find out for another 8-10 weeks about our passing score and I'm going to try to forget about it as much as possible so I don't stress myself out waiting for the results that are no longer in my control. Best of luck! 

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ezzieyguywuf said:

I took the MDM exam last friday. Not sure if anyone else on here took that exam, but my thoughts are that I felt pretty well prepared, though there were a few questions that caught me off guard. More specifically (while not being too specific) there were two questions on the morning exam (is the morning exam common to all mech exams?) which I felt were altogether too ambiguous. I wasn't feeling so bad about the morning exam. On the afternoon exam, though, I felt there were a number of questions (at least two) that either did not have sufficient information or where the information provided was misleading - what I mean by this is that the question seemed straightforward enough, I solved the problem and found that my solution would be off my an order of magnitude from what was presented. This means that either I solved the problem completely wrong (which is possible, but I literally solved some of these 5 times) or that something is amiss with the answers provided.

Overall I would say I feel goodish about the exam, but I'm a bit concerned regarding the afternoon exam due to the number of problems I had "issues" with, only a handful of which I would attribute to my own shortcomings.

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namod65 said:

I took HVAC and I think I did pretty well. Skipped one question in the morning, and skipped one in the afternoon. Answered all the "general knowledge" questions that didn't require any calculation, but circled a few to come back and revisit. Finished both sessions with over an hour left and had plenty of time to revisit the ones I circled. Only 2 questions out of the 80 I didn't arrive at an answer that was one of the four choices. So here's to hoping I didn't get "tricked" 15 to 20 times lol.

I thought the NCEES practice tests were a good representation of the exam. Now of course the questions didn't ask you the same exact things the practice exam did, but if you actually knew the topics well, and not just memorize how to solve the practice exam, then you could easy figure out that they're asking you something slightly different and you need this variable instead of this one, etc...

I'll post a lengthy review of my study process and what were the best review materials in the main thread once I get confirmation that I passed. Fingers still crossed until then lol.

Click to expand...

sbrookef said:

This past Friday, I took MDM. Morning for me was easier than afternoon (blindly guessed on about 3-4 questions). Afternoon exam I think I had more time management issues, or perhaps the questions were harder, and I wound up guessing on about 5 of the problems (some were educated guesses). Even though the pass rate for the exam is 75%, for instance, I was not under the impression you needed a 75% of the questions right to pass. I thought that proctors or PEs of some sort took the PE exam and then questions that were "unfair" got thrown out. I thought I also read on this forum that people that got around 50 or 55 questions right had passed, and that is certainly not a raw score of 75%. In any case, no matter how the grading is, we all won't find out for another 8-10 weeks about our passing score and I'm going to try to forget about it as much as possible so I don't stress myself out waiting for the results that are no longer in my control. Best of luck! 

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glowe said:

I also took the HVAC exam. I thought the morning was very straightforward, and  the afternoon was more challenging but not too hard. The last two problems of the afternoon session seemed like the same problem, just different numbers and a slightly different description. I thought it was odd to have almost the exact same problem twice...

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glowe said:

I also took the HVAC exam. I thought the morning was very straightforward, and  the afternoon was more challenging but not too hard. The last two problems of the afternoon session seemed like the same problem, just different numbers and a slightly different description. I thought it was odd to have almost the exact same problem twice...

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justdoitNG said:

I agree, AM section was easier than the afternoon section in HVAC test. Overall I think I guessed on about 5-6 problems total..I am sure I will make few other mistakes..this was my 2nd time around..I did feel better this time come out..I hope I pass..ASHRAE handbooks were super helpful..this was one of the ref material I did not take last time (Apri)!!..keeping my fingers crossed.

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cetavion said:

I left my post on general PE thread and copy it to here:

I took thermal and fluid. I also looked through and solved every problem on NCEES sample exams -2001,2008,2011, and 2016, but I felt the actual exam is pretty harder than the sample problem sets. I am not sure I am able to make 70% mark... The morning session was okay compared to the afternoon. I think I guestimated 5 problems, but there should be some mistakes other 35 questions. For the afternoon session, that's just an OMG. After going through all problems in the afternoon, I have left 14 problems which I did not have a good clue at all. I was able to find answers to 5 problems by looking at RM, but overall I left random answers on 9 problems. Of course, there should be some mistakes on other 31 problems in the afternoon. I am leaning toward more pessimistic on my result.... 

Thermo fluid was so hard... Some of the problems are no clue to take an engineering guess... 

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namod65 said:

Unless you are very experienced HVAC consulting engineer (like my bosses who can pull random design facts out of their ass since they've been doing it 40 years), there's no way you would do well on many of the questions without all 4 ASHRAE books. I took it for the first time Friday and now I can absolutely understand how hard of a time you had the first time without them.

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