MDM CBT exam registration and prep!

Hi All,

I didn’t pass the second time either, well I shouldn’t really count the first try because I was definitely underprepared but I improved the second time but still not quite there yet (mid 40’s). Supportive knowledge section killed me, lots of unexpected questions that I hadn’t seen anywhere. I did way better in supportive knowledge on the first try. 

This means all those binders I prepared with tabs and all that will stay home since I will need to take the CBT exam next time. Well at least I can say I took the last paper and pencil session and will take the first CBT exam for mechanicals haha 

2 questions:

1) Mechanical CBT is brand new, how should I prepare for MDM? How would you prepare? I mean it is also brand new for all those prep classes and not sure how much those would help. 

2) Has anyone tried to register for CBT? It doesn’t give you the option of choosing a testing center or anything, you just register for the CBT exam without any details. For the CBT FE exam we could choose the testing center. So, how does this work? 

Thanks in advance! 

Abogos said:

Hi All,

I didn’t pass the second time either, well I shouldn’t really count the first try because I was definitely underprepared but I improved the second time but still not quite there yet (mid 40’s). Supportive knowledge section killed me, lots of unexpected questions that I hadn’t seen anywhere. I did way better in supportive knowledge on the first try. 

This means all those binders I prepared with tabs and all that will stay home since I will need to take the CBT exam next time. Well at least I can say I took the last paper and pencil session and will take the first CBT exam for mechanicals haha 

2 questions:

1) Mechanical CBT is brand new, how should I prepare for MDM? How would you prepare? I mean it is also brand new for all those prep classes and not sure how much those would help. 

2) Has anyone tried to register for CBT? It doesn’t give you the option of choosing a testing center or anything, you just register for the CBT exam without any details. For the CBT FE exam we could choose the testing center. So, how does this work? 

Thanks in advance! 

Click to expand...

I am preparing for the CBT HVAC&R exam by doing the following:

Solving problems using the PPI Learning Hub online database of practice problems, quizzes, and practice tests. There are some errors in these problems but overall they are pretty good. These problems actually have been formulated for the CBT. The problems only use equations and information from the NCEES reference manual (unless it is a qualitative experience based question).

Solving problems from the supporting reference materials and reading the supporting reference materials (these are all the ASHRAE handbooks in my case).

Doing the latest CBT NCEES practice exam.

Familiarizing myself with the new NCEES reference manual (which is full of errors by the way).

I'm not taking a prep class.

I am avoiding older practice exams and practice problems that are not formatted for the CBT. This is because these problems require equations that are not in the NCEES reference manual. While the NCEES website does say that they can ask you questions from outside the manual, I highly doubt that they will ask you to solve a problem that requires an equation that is not in the reference manual, unless that equation is something that any engineer should know (like F=ma or P=F/A or something basic like that).

I am registered for the exam. If you follow the steps on the NCEES website it will let you choose a testing center. When I went through the process on the NCEES website I clicked a link that took me to the Pearson View testing center website and followed the instructions. There were plenty of details provided.

OldSquaw said:

I am preparing for the CBT HVAC&R exam by doing the following:

Solving problems using the PPI Learning Hub online database of practice problems, quizzes, and practice tests. There are some errors in these problems but overall they are pretty good. These problems actually have been formulated for the CBT. The problems only use equations and information from the NCEES reference manual (unless it is a qualitative experience based question).

Solving problems from the supporting reference materials and reading the supporting reference materials (these are all the ASHRAE handbooks in my case).

Doing the latest CBT NCEES practice exam.

Familiarizing myself with the new NCEES reference manual (which is full of errors by the way).

I'm not taking a prep class.

I am avoiding older practice exams and practice problems that are not formatted for the CBT. This is because these problems require equations that are not in the NCEES reference manual. While the NCEES website does say that they can ask you questions from outside the manual, I highly doubt that they will ask you to solve a problem that requires an equation that is not in the reference manual, unless that equation is something that any engineer should know (like F=ma or P=F/A or something basic like that).

I am registered for the exam. If you follow the steps on the NCEES website it will let you choose a testing center. When I went through the process on the NCEES website I clicked a link that took me to the Pearson View testing center website and followed the instructions. There were plenty of details provided.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your input. I registered and chose the test center. I was a bit confused because you choose the test center after you pay, I was thinking once I click “complete order” that’s it.

I looked at PPI’s website and they’ve got different bundles, I may go with the monthly subscription of PPI learning hub online. I took Dr. Tom’s course last time and it was good but I’d say it didn’t go in depth as much as the questions on the test went. Those review courses are good for someone who has been out of school for so long and want to refresh their memory. 

How do you go about topics like MATERIALS? there is so much detail in the MERM and if I didn’t have the MERM I wouldn’t be able to answer those easily. Do we have to memorize all that for the CBT? 

Also, has NCEES practice test changed for CBT? When I was registering, it offered me the practice test and when I clicked on “preview” all the questions I saw were the same exact ones from before. 

To answer your question about memorizing stuff from the MERM, nobody knows. Nobody has taken the mechanical CBT yet so any responses you get will be people's opinions. 

My opinion is that you should focus on the NCEES reference manual. By publishing this manual, NCEES is basically saying "hey, study this stuff!". Will there be questions on the exam that are not in the NCEES manual? Probably. But my guess is that 75% or more of the test will be from material straight out of the NCEES manual. The other 25% will probably be experience/common knowledge type stuff. Again, this is just my guess.

If I were you I would master everything in the NCEES reference manual. Then if you have time branch out to other things. Also I would review the exam syllabus that NCEES publishes. Is there anything on the syllabus that is not covered in the NCEES reference manual? If so, memorize that stuff!

On the description for the "new" CBT practice exam, it says "same great questions with a new format". This means that the "new" practice exam has the same problems but they have formatted some to have alternative item types like what will be on the exam. I haven't bought the new exam but this is what I gathered from reading the description.

I received my Texas score as 67% so I guess I was pretty close for MDM. Basic engineering practice and supportive knowledge turned out to be the weakest link and made all the difference. I did not find any reference other than engineering pro guide which was very helpful. I did self study but only solved Ncees exam questions so I guess I just need more practice questions. I agree MDM is pretty diverse especially in materials so it will be luck but I guess most of the stuff should circle around Reference manual released by NCEES.  Infact I highlighted and added equations which were missing and tried to use that as sole reference during my exam( There were plenty of errors as well so I made note of those equations to use from Merm)

I am planning to enroll in PPI online learning hub for questions and again will be doing self study as I just feel little more practice could have made the difference. 

I feel except getting comfortable with new CBT questions most of our materials still remains the Same. It boils down to clear concepts and little agility as I could not finish my AM portion in 4 hours and had to blindly guess on 12-14 questions. The pm portion was breeze but just not enough to get over the other side. I guess Machinery Handbook has pretty good Theory for Materials so I would circle back on it again. MDM is pretty diverse no doubt.

ashu04 said:

I received my Texas score as 67% so I guess I was pretty close for MDM. Basic engineering practice and supportive knowledge turned out to be the weakest link and made all the difference. I did not find any reference other than engineering pro guide which was very helpful. I did self study but only solved Ncees exam questions so I guess I just need more practice questions. I agree MDM is pretty diverse especially in materials so it will be luck but I guess most of the stuff should circle around Reference manual released by NCEES.  Infact I highlighted and added equations which were missing and tried to use that as sole reference during my exam( There were plenty of errors as well so I made note of those equations to use from Merm)

I am planning to enroll in PPI online learning hub for questions and again will be doing self study as I just feel little more practice could have made the difference. 

I feel except getting comfortable with new CBT questions most of our materials still remains the Same. It boils down to clear concepts and little agility as I could not finish my AM portion in 4 hours and had to blindly guess on 12-14 questions. The pm portion was breeze but just not enough to get over the other side. I guess Machinery Handbook has pretty good Theory for Materials so I would circle back on it again. MDM is pretty diverse no doubt.

Click to expand...

Oh wow, if you got 67% and didn’t pass, the cut score was definitely 54+ ???

i totally bombed the supportive knowledge section and it made a difference for me. I agree that focusing on the reference manual is a good idea but Materials is a big part of the exam, not sure if we need to memorize all the materials characteristics and all that, it is hard to memorize too since there is so much info in the MERM. Really don’t know how to go about it. What other discipline could have the same problem and they are on CBT? Oh maybe Chemical PE , we could ask them. 

Yea agility and lots of practice are very important, however I think there is a little factor of luck also involved in terms on what questions you get, on my second try there were some questions I hadn’t seen at all in any of my practice books nor in the MERM.  

You mentioned that your main weakness was supportive knowledge, which I don't think has materials in it. So if I were you I would just do every problem you can get your hands on regarding supportive knowledge. The PPI Learning Hub breaks down the problem categories by the exam categories, so you can do only supportive knowledge problems if you want. It sounds like you also need to study the Machinery's Handbook, ANSI, ASTM, ASME, etc. The Engineering Pro Guides website has all of the needed references for the supportive knowledge section, so I would review all of those. I hear what you are saying regarding the difficulty of remembering materials, but if this was not your weakness then I wouldn't worry about it.

P.S. on the PPI Learning Hub, I have found it useful to do the quizzes in "practice mode." I will just click an answer to see the solution first. I wont actually read the solution, but if the solution is crazy long then I know that problem is way too complex for the exam so I will skip it. Another strategy I use on the Learning Hub is to skip the problems that I immediately know how to solve, that way I am spending my time improving on my weak areas.

You may be able to get some insight from the chemical guys. I guess the safest thing to do would be to try your best to memorize the stuff that's on the exam syllabus but not in the NCEES reference manual. Look at it this way, if you pass the exam and you really didn't need to memorize all that stuff, it will only help you in your career.

OldSquaw said:

You mentioned that your main weakness was supportive knowledge, which I don't think has materials in it. So if I were you I would just do every problem you can get your hands on regarding supportive knowledge. The PPI Learning Hub breaks down the problem categories by the exam categories, so you can do only supportive knowledge problems if you want. It sounds like you also need to study the Machinery's Handbook, ANSI, ASTM, ASME, etc. The Engineering Pro Guides website has all of the needed references for the supportive knowledge section, so I would review all of those. I hear what you are saying regarding the difficulty of remembering materials, but if this was not your weakness then I wouldn't worry about it.

P.S. on the PPI Learning Hub, I have found it useful to do the quizzes in "practice mode." I will just click an answer to see the solution first. I wont actually read the solution, but if the solution is crazy long then I know that problem is way too complex for the exam so I will skip it. Another strategy I use on the Learning Hub is to skip the problems that I immediately know how to solve, that way I am spending my time improving on my weak areas.

You may be able to get some insight from the chemical guys. I guess the safest thing to do would be to try your best to memorize the stuff that's on the exam syllabus but not in the NCEES reference manual. Look at it this way, if you pass the exam and you really didn't need to memorize all that stuff, it will only help you in your career.

Click to expand...

I did alright in materials section mainly because I had the MERM, I didn’t necessarily know the answer, I just used the MERM to get the answer, so what I am saying is that now that we won’t have the MERM what do we do if we get same type of questions, and memorizing all that stuff is going to be very difficult, that’s why I thought chemicals had to go through the same thing since they also have subjects like materials that have a lot of details. 

As you said, it is a good idea to focus on reference manual stuff and just do problems using the manual and probably memorize everything else that’s not in the manual. Hopefully the manual will make the test less diverse and unexpected questions won’t pop up as much. I am planning to subscribe to PPI learning hub for the 3 month plan, looks like it will give us good practice. Not sure another review course is really necessary.

That's a good point and I understand where you are coming from. Maybe try posting that question in the chemical section. It might be worth a shot.

Abogos said:

Oh wow, if you got 67% and didn’t pass, the cut score was definitely 54+ ???

i totally bombed the supportive knowledge section and it made a difference for me. I agree that focusing on the reference manual is a good idea but Materials is a big part of the exam, not sure if we need to memorize all the materials characteristics and all that, it is hard to memorize too since there is so much info in the MERM. Really don’t know how to go about it. What other discipline could have the same problem and they are on CBT? Oh maybe Chemical PE , we could ask them. 

Yea agility and lots of practice are very important, however I think there is a little factor of luck also involved in terms on what questions you get, on my second try there were some questions I hadn’t seen at all in any of my practice books nor in the MERM.  

Click to expand...

I am not sure if the if that is scaled score against Texas candidates or all across the states so I would not break my head trying to guess the cutoff but yes somewhere close to your prediction would be safe bet. I agree we cannot memorize everything so industry experience might help. 

I am planning to cover about materials mentioned in NCEES reference manual in detail from other references but  I guess there will be questions which will throw us off and we won't be able to do anything so luck is definitely involved.

ashu04 said:

I received my Texas score as 67% so I guess I was pretty close for MDM. ...

Click to expand...

Abogos said:

Oh wow, if you got 67% and didn’t pass, the cut score was definitely 54+ ???

...

Click to expand...

ashu04 said:

I am not sure if the if that is scaled score against Texas candidates or all across the states so I would not break my head trying to guess the cutoff but yes somewhere close to your prediction would be safe bet....

Click to expand...

I'm reposting this from another thread where I posted it. Texas percentages cannot be converted into a raw score because reasons...

--------------------------------------------------

 It's weird.

By law (? statute? regulation? rule? whatever), Texas has defined 70% as the score required to pass. But Texas doesn't get to determine the passing score. NCEES determines the passing score (called the cut score), and it's different for every exam and different every time the exam is administered.

NCEES determines the cut score by having a committee of existing PEs weigh the difficulty of each question and assess what percentage of PEs should reasonably be able to get that question right. It's a whole process. But the takeaway for this discussion is that the passing score is different for every exam (Civil: WRE, vs Civil: Construction, vs Mech: HVAC, etc). And it changes every time the exam is administered (Civil: WRE April 2019 is different than Civil: WRE Oct 2019, etc). Also we don't get to know what the cut score is.

So NCEES says the (unknown) cut score is passing, and Texas says you need 70% to pass. That doesn't match up. So what Texas does, is they arbitrarily define whatever the cut score is for each exam as 70%. That part is understood. But how the percentages change as you move away from 70% is not understood. From what I've heard people say, it doesn't appear to be linear. I assume it's some statistical distribution, but who knows.

Here's an example: In the "Cut Score" thread someone who didn't pass posted that their diagnostics from NCEES said they got 46/80, which is 57.5%. Their Texas provided result said they got a score of 69%. We know 70% is passing, so they were probably pretty close, but because it's weird and nonlinear, we still don't know exactly what the cut score is. (That being said, people like to speculate and to try and figure it out.)

jean15paul_PE said:

I'm reposting this from another thread where I posted it. Texas percentages cannot be converted into a raw score because reasons...

--------------------------------------------------

 It's weird.

By law (? statute? regulation? rule? whatever), Texas has defined 70% as the score required to pass. But Texas doesn't get to determine the passing score. NCEES determines the passing score (called the cut score), and it's different for every exam and different every time the exam is administered.

NCEES determines the cut score by having a committee of existing PEs weigh the difficulty of each question and assess what percentage of PEs should reasonably be able to get that question right. It's a whole process. But the takeaway for this discussion is that the passing score is different for every exam (Civil: WRE, vs Civil: Construction, vs Mech: HVAC, etc). And it changes every time the exam is administered (Civil: WRE April 2019 is different than Civil: WRE Oct 2019, etc). Also we don't get to know what the cut score is.

So NCEES says the (unknown) cut score is passing, and Texas says you need 70% to pass. That doesn't match up. So what Texas does, is they arbitrarily define whatever the cut score is for each exam as 70%. That part is understood. But how the percentages change as you move away from 70% is not understood. From what I've heard people say, it doesn't appear to be linear. I assume it's some statistical distribution, but who knows.

Here's an example: In the "Cut Score" thread someone who didn't pass posted that their diagnostics from NCEES said they got 46/80, which is 57.5%. Their Texas provided result said they got a score of 69%. We know 70% is passing, so they were probably pretty close, but because it's weird and nonlinear, we still don't know exactly what the cut score is. (That being said, people like to speculate and to try and figure it out.)

Click to expand...

After I read your example I understood what you meant, so Texas’ result (Percentage) is not a direct ratio of earned points to 80. So I am wondering, if we know for sure 70% is passing for Texas then doesn’t this make the guesswork for cut off score easy? For instance in your example, that person got 46/80 and a Texas score of 69% and if passing is 70%, isn’t it safe to assume the cut score was somewhere between 46-50/80???

anyway, not to get too far from the original thread, I know you already passed your test but how do you think we should prepare for the CBT?

Abogos said:

After I read your example I understood what you meant, so Texas’ result (Percentage) is not a direct ratio of earned points to 80. So I am wondering, if we know for sure 70% is passing for Texas then doesn’t this make the guesswork for cut off score easy? For instance in your example, that person got 46/80 and a Texas score of 69% and if passing is 70%, isn’t it safe to assume the cut score was somewhere between 46-50/80???

anyway, not to get too far from the original thread, I know you already passed your test but how do you think we should prepare for the CBT?

Click to expand...

Yeah, people try to figure it out, and can get reasonably close, but you just never know for sure.

Regarding preparation for the CBT, I don't know. Preparation is such a personal thing. When I took the exam last year, I 100% knew that I needed to take a course to prepare. I'm a pretty intelligent person, but I just don't learn well from reading on my own. It's just not my learning style. I needed something more interactive and I needed someone else to determine my schedule and topics.
Because of that, if it was me, I'd be very tempted to wait a year or so for the courses to catch up to the CBT format. But I realize that's not an acceptable answer for most people.

The one thing that you should definitely do is get a copy of the CBT reference and use it for all of your preparation. You need to be VERY familiar with it by the time the test comes around.