# PE exam prep help?



## samirgupta (May 10, 2012)

Hello Everyone,

I am Samir Gupta. I recently graduated with MS in Electrical Engineering (Electrical Power and Energy Systems). I have cleared FE exam in December 2011. I want to pursue for PE. I will start my employment from June 1st 2012.

I read the requirements for PE to be two years of experience with Masters (Correct me if I am wrong).

I needed some guidance/advise on what all topics to study ?

What are good reference books to refer from?


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## Ken PE 3.1 (May 11, 2012)

Massachusetts requires 3 years experience for a MS degree before taking the PE. You would need to check out the state board's website to get info for where you live.

There are a ton of threads that have good advice on what other people have used to study for the exam.

Good luck at your new job and welcome to the wonderful world of power engineering.


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## mauldinite (May 14, 2012)

Florida is the same way. An MS counts for 12 months worth of experience toward the 48 months required to take the exam. I think I read that California counts it as 2 or 3 years though.


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## mevans154 (May 15, 2012)

NJ counts a Master's degree as 12 months experience, and a Doctorate degree as 24 months experience.


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## PCNerd (Jun 2, 2012)

Per the other posts, the requirements for each state on when you can write the PE exam vary, so it would be best to confirm with your state board.

With respects to study material, I wrote and PASSED the April 2012 Electical and Electronics PE Exam, here's the study material I used:

1) Electrical and Electronics Reference Manual (John A. Camara)

2) Electrical and Electronics Practice Problems (John A. Camara)

3) Electrical and Electronics Sample Exam (John A. Camara)

4) NEC 2011 Handbook

5) NCEES Sample Exam

6) Schaum's Electromagnetics, Schaum's Analog &amp; Digitial Communications, Schaum's Electric Circuits, and Schaum's Electric Power Systems.

The above material made me very well prepared for the exam and I felt very confident leaving the exam that I had done more than enough to pass the exam.

I hope this helps and wish you good luck for the October 2012 exam (if you are allowed to write it).

As a side note, I do have all of the above material (excluding the Camara EERM) available for sale. If you are interested, reply to this thread and I will send you my contact info.


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## elminses (Jun 4, 2012)

PCnerd I'm looking to buy your materials


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## PCNerd (Jun 7, 2012)

Sounds good. i left you a message. Check your inbox and let me know if you are still interested.


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## redtree (Jun 8, 2012)

There's lots of advice (some of it conflicting) on what to study to pass the PE exam.

I think something very important that may be missing is an ability to take a multiple choice exam.

I'm sure I just squeaked by and I wonder how much of it is attributed to test taking ability.

My steps:

1) read the questions in order - I recommend not totally skimming, but not reading too much detail. Read enough to get a sense if you could answer it easily or not. If it requires one thorough reading and simple calculation - Do it and move on!

2) Any questions that cannot be answered immediately - move on. Make sure you read it enough to "know what you don't know" about it. I think this is important. First, something later on may jog your memory and it all falls into place. Second, when you get to the research phase, you may be able to save time by researching multiple questions in parallel.

3) Although you are moving on through the questions, rank them in difficulty, stars, numbers or something. When you go back to research more you'll attack them in order.

4) the first pass can also be used to answer the questions that you know that you don't know (and probably never will!). You can use this to make a wild-ass guess and not worry about it again - be careful though. Often times, you will think you have no idea, but something will come up later and change that.

5) eliminate wrong answers by crossing them out - use a quick note to justify your rationale for when you return to the question. I usually do this even for the ones that I "know" the answer to.

6) after the first pass of the exam - BREATHE!. Whether or not you feel great about the answers, you made it through one pass. Then start attacking the questions in the order that you ranked them.

7) Sometime before the end (but usaully near the end, maybe half hour or so) go back and check you answers in the ranked order that you have. Even though you were sure of the anwer, things may have changed.

8) spend the last 5 minutes, checking the complete shading of the circles, erase stray marks, make sure the answer sheet corresponds correctly answers, guess at whatever you didn't fill in earlier.

If you read the whole message - then I hope I didn't waste you time!

Good luck to all!


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