# CBT Power PE Exam 2021



## RadioBox (Feb 5, 2019)

The exam at its current format will be administered only 4 times before it changes. The new format will be closed book in that you won't be required to bring a trove of references. You will be provided with a pdf of formulas. This tells us the paper exam + open book setup has become obsolete.  I wonder how this will exactly impact the questions/difficulty of the exam.


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## a4u2fear (Feb 5, 2019)

RadioBox said:


> The exam at its current format will be administered only 4 times before it changes. The new format will be closed book in that you won't be required to bring a trove of references. You will be provided with a pdf of formulas. This tells us the paper exam + open book setup has become obsolete.  I wonder how this will exactly impact the questions/difficulty of the exam.


how has it changed in difficulty for the other PE exams that have done it already?


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## Messi (Feb 5, 2019)

I believe it will be more difficult. I remember when I took the FE exam with the NCEES provided PDF, not all information or formulas were available.


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## eatsleep (Feb 5, 2019)

Messi said:


> I believe it will be more difficult. I remember when I took the FE exam with the NCEES provided PDF, not all information or formulas were available.


I don't think so. How can they move to a closed book exam and make it more difficult, that would be ridiculous


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## roy167 (Feb 5, 2019)

Going from paper based to CBT will be a huge change. I'm thinking it will take few exams before they figure out the right difficulty level where certain percentage of people pass. Kind of like curving or relative scoring.  This may be advantageous for folks like us as we get to try paper based and if you pass then there is nothing to further do but if you don't pass then always can give it a try with CBT to see if you have a luck there. People before us and after CBT won't have this flexibility.


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## Messi (Feb 5, 2019)

eatsleep said:


> I don't think so. How can they move to a closed book exam and make it more difficult, that would be ridiculous


Difficult in the sense the pdf might not have all the things you need to solve a problem, not the overall difficulty of the exam itself.


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## Phenomenon083 (Feb 5, 2019)

Messi said:


> Difficult in the sense the pdf might not have all the things you need to solve a problem, not the overall difficulty of the exam itself.


That actually nullify the whole point of making the exam computer based. Obviously all the information to solve a problem will be in the PDF, we would just have to figure out how to find it. The only difficulty would be we will step into unknown territory, it will take couple exam cycles to figure out really how and what to study for power PE exam and someone to come up with a good exam preparation book for the power PE exam.

Also I think CBT exam will be cheaper for us, we won't have to break the bank to buy all the reference materials for the exam.


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## Wow_PE! (Jul 26, 2019)

How are they going to handle code questions.  Will the searchable pdf have sections of the nec?


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## bdhlphcdh (Jul 29, 2019)

It will interesting to see how they implement the resources portion of the exam considering that is such a huge and vital part in preparing for the exam.  Simply making any reference searchable would drastically reduce the time it takes to locate information, which again, is a level of difficulty built into how the exam is formatted.


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## roy167 (Jul 31, 2019)

I'm coming out of self exiled mode. The person said they weren't posting in this forum because I was annoying them. I have not posted for two months and that person isn't posting either.  We always need some or the other excuse. Sounds familiar, "because of you, I'm not doing this....". 

To answer the topic, why isn't NCEES thinking about a CBT exam yet you can take the reference material as you are allowed to take now? Only change would be, you would read the question on computer screen and check the bubbles, a lot cleaner, a lot more  efficient, reduce the errors to a great extent, no need to deal with physical test papers and transportation and delay and they don't have to think about how change in exam format is going to affect what. 

 Govt can't think out of the box.


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