Another sample exam tomorrow?

Hi all,

We are getting pretty close. About three weeks ago I took the "Other Board" sample exam (Mechanical). Needless to say the score was not good, about 50%. Yesterday I took the NCEES sample exam with machine design depth. 35/40 morning and 32/40 afternoon. I had worked the problems a few months before, so the score may be a little biased, but I honestly couldn't remember that many of them.

I had planned on taking the NCEES exam yesterday, going over it today, and then taking another sample exam (Kaplan) on Sunday, which of course is only 5 days before the real thing. About 2 hours into the afternoon section of yesterdays sample test I was almost convinced that I could not do another one in 2 days. I was burned out.

Is taking another sample exam (Kaplan) tomorrow overkill, and can it even be counterproductive if it wears me out for Friday? Whats the latest a sample exam should be taken before the real thing? Any tips for exam day endurance? 4 hours in the morning is doable, but i'm finding that about 2 hours into the afternoon things are getting tough.

Thanks.

Matt-NM said:

Hi all,
We are getting pretty close. About three weeks ago I took the "Other Board" sample exam (Mechanical). Needless to say the score was not good, about 50%. Yesterday I took the NCEES sample exam with machine design depth. 35/40 morning and 32/40 afternoon. I had worked the problems a few months before, so the score may be a little biased, but I honestly couldn't remember that many of them.

I had planned on taking the NCEES exam yesterday, going over it today, and then taking another sample exam (Kaplan) on Sunday, which of course is only 5 days before the real thing. About 2 hours into the afternoon section of yesterdays sample test I was almost convinced that I could not do another one in 2 days. I was burned out.

Is taking another sample exam (Kaplan) tomorrow overkill, and can it even be counterproductive if it wears me out for Friday? Whats the latest a sample exam should be taken before the real thing? Any tips for exam day endurance? 4 hours in the morning is doable, but i'm finding that about 2 hours into the afternoon things are getting tough.

Thanks.

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I don't have any real tips or opinion on another sample exam. On exam day people usually find the energy to endure. You sound like you are in pretty good shape with your score on the NCEES.

Sounds like you did the NCEES test and did well.

If it were me I'd avoid another 8-hour slugfest tomorrow. It's your last day to relax and take it easy before the big day.

VTEnviro said:

Sounds like you did the NCEES test and did well.
If it were me I'd avoid another 8-hour slugfest tomorrow. It's your last day to relax and take it easy before the big day.

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I second VTEnviro's comment. Have you thought of just working the problems as additional practice instead of timed? Just a thought...

I think that is exactly what I will do. It seems like the 8-hour marathons take a few days to recover from, days that I need this week for final review. I took the NCEES sample on Friday on had to basically take the day off on Saturday. I was fried. Thus, I think another marathon today would have killed the beginning of my week.

I will just work through as many of the Kaplan problems as I can. I'm taking this week off from work, but am starting to think that I probably won't kill myself with studying. I will mainly review, go over some weak areas, and skim through sample exams/MERM problems to make sure I remember the approach to the solution.

I now firmly believe what others have said about not killing yourself the last week. After three months I am pretty fried. I think I will try to have a little fun this week as well and do what I can to go into the exam fresh and with a good, related attitude.

What is everybody else's plan for the last week?

Good luck to all.

What is everybody else's plan for the last week?

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What I did was take care of the 'soft' prep. Packing my references, checking my motel reservation, getting my test room survival kit (extra calc, ear plugs, aspirin) put together, checking out the venue location the day before, etc.

I went over my references the last week to make sure that I could quickly find everything, and added a couple of tabs to tables/charts I thought I might need that I had missed before.

^^^ I did the same thing - mostly reviewed my organization, notes, tables/charts, etc.

Oh, and for the problems I decided to tackle, I only bothered with setting up the problems (e.g. looking up pertinent info, setting up relevant equation(s)). I didn't bother to go through calculating the value since I was mostly interested in how to solve it - not necessarily the answer. By taking that approach, I was able to cover roughly twice as much more follow-up material had I tried to plug-n-chug.

JR

I have to work all week, but will be traveling the day before to the test site to stay in a hotel.

I plan on looking through all my notes/refrences/practice tests and going through misc problems from the "the other board" exam/6 minute solutions. But I am not going to burn myself out. I plan an sticking at studying 2.5 hours after work and maybe even a little during work.

At this point I just want to get comfortable with everything I have studied. I am still not real confident, but I don't know if anybody really is. I hope to stay calm during the exam. I was good at this at college, but I have never spent this much time for one test. I just don't want to let myself or my family down. So that adds a little pressure. If the test is very similar to NCEES practice test (thermo/fluids depth), then I believe and would be in good shape.

Good luck to everybody on Friday.

M.E. Nebraska said:

At this point I just want to get comfortable with everything I have studied. I am still not real confident, but I don't know if anybody really is. I hope to stay calm during the exam. I was good at this at college, but I have never spent this much time for one test. I just don't want to let myself or my family down. So that adds a little pressure. If the test is very similar to NCEES practice test (thermo/fluids depth), then I believe and would be in good shape.
Good luck to everybody on Friday.

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When I did the FE test last year I said to my wife

"My god! I never ever studied this much for any course in university!"

For finals, I would only start studying two days before the exam and that was usually enough...

For the FE, I think the amount of studying I did for the difficulty of the exam was overkill and I was a bit pissed off that I wasted so much time... but then again maybe I needed that time...

For the PE I have studied every night and at least 8 hours Saturday and Sunday since January... Again, a lot of studying, but I have more riding on this exam than what I had for the FE...

To stay on topic.... Mon, Tues, and Wed nights day I will be reviewing subjects.

Thursday I make a 3-4 hour drive north to Edmonton, drive by the exam location, check out parking and lunch spots (to see if I need to bring a lunch or not) and head over to a family friend's house to spend the night...

Which reminds me, I need to burn a few CDs for the trip up north... I figure some good death metal should put me in the right mood.

I did the Thermo/fluids depth of the Lindeburg Exam yesterday. And only go to about half the problems, and didn't get them all right, which has me pretty stressed. Either I'm really slow or those were fairly long problems.

Probably the former.

yea, I've never studied this much for a test. I wish now I'd put in as much time as Casey. I've done that over the past maybe month, but prior to that it was a couple times a week, and a little over the weekends. That was from January through about Early March. Then I started to ramp it up.

Guess it just didn't really start panicking me until March to motivate me to do the 6 day a week thing.

I probably have approx 120-150 hours in and over 200 pages of problems worked (1-2 problems per page average.

But I still feel pretty weak in many areas, and not really that -strong- in anything. Fluids is probably my strongest, and I still make lots of stupid mistakes in that. Proabably haven't hit the machine design and materials sections enough. I'll try to brush up on that some this week.

Hopefully the actual test questions are shorter/easier than the questions I've been doing because I usually a fair amount longer than 6 minutes a problem.

I wouldn't take another practice exam if I were you. I took only one, and I felt that was enough. I spent the last week kind of tapering down, doing a lot of reading and tabbing of books on subjects I felt weak on, and doing probably an hour or two of problems each day - much less than I had been doing in the months before. The day before the exam, I ran through the NCEES practice exam again, which was easy because I had already done all the problems (it took me about 4 hours), but it was an excellent exercize just to make sure my brain didn't wind down too much before exam day.