2011 NCEES Practice Exam

[DavidPE]

I just finished taking the 2011 NCEES practice exam under realistic conditions (Yikes! :shakehead: ), and I have two questions:

1. Should I expect the exam booklet to have about same amount of space to work problems as in the practice exam?

2. I expected the problems to be completely random in order. They were random, but the morning session was almost exclusively water and wastewater, and the afternoon was primarily air, solid/hazardous waste and health & safety. Should I expect the real exam to be organized in a similar fashion?

Thanks guys!

 

[Dleg]

I can't remember if scratch paper was given to us, or if we had to use the booklet. But yeah, the actual exam booklet is laid out about the same as the practice exam.

When I took the the exam in 2006, the organization was as you observed - water topics in the morning, air and others in the pm. NOT random. I doubt it has changed, but hopefully someone with more recent experience can chime in.

 

[DavidPE]

Thanks very much for the reply.

My understanding is that we won't have access to any additional paper, but there seemed to be just enough room in the practice test booklet. Hopefully there's not less room on the real thing. I'm not sure where I got the idea that the questions were going to be in a more random order. I worked right up until the end in the morning, but I had a solid hour left over in the afternoon.

 

[envirotex]

I took the exam in 2010...there was no scratch paper allowed (writing in the booklet only), and you're not allowed to write in your references. I would say that the questions were somewhat in random order...count on the percentages for each topic being correct, though.

 

[CU07]

I took the exam in April 2012 in NY. No scratch paper was given, but I had enough room in my booklet.

The exam was divided up exactly into all water topics (32%) and solid waste (18%) in the morning, and the afternoon was air (23%), remediation (12%), health and safety (8%), and other engineering principles (7%). It follows the exam breakdown almost perfectly. My economics questions were all at the end of the afternoon, for example. I heard the same thing from testakers in October 2011 and October 2012, so I think you can count on the same morning/afternoon division.

 

[mkt1]

I took the exam in April 2012 in NY. No scratch paper was given, but I had enough room in my booklet.

The exam was divided up exactly into all water topics (32%) and solid waste (18%) in the morning, and the afternoon was air (23%), remediation (12%), health and safety (8%), and other engineering principles (7%). It follows the exam breakdown almost perfectly. My economics questions were all at the end of the afternoon, for example. I heard the same thing from testakers in October 2011 and October 2012, so I think you can count on the same morning/afternoon division.

Yes - October 2012 exam was exactly the same way - water/wastewater/hydrology + solid waste in the AM and the rest in the PM.

The NCEES practice test is pretty much exactly how the actual exam is in terms of format - both spacing and fonts of questions. The exam will feel quite familiar. Also it seems from other PE disciplines as well that there is at least one problem in the booklet that will be either exactly the same or similar on the exam so make sure you know them all inside and out!

 

[DavidPE]

I hadn't heard that before, but I'm planning to work through the practice exam one more time this weekend, so if there are any similar problems, I'm sure I'll recognize them. Hopefully it's one of the harder/longer ones.

Anyway, thanks very much everyone, I appreciate it. Regardless of how this turns out, I'm so glad to be in the final stretch.

 

[CU07]

In April 2012, I had 4 problems that I recognized from the 2011 NCEES exam. Two were the exact same problems but with different values. One had the same diagram but asked a different question. The 4th wasn't really similar at all, but I remembered getting a question wrong on the practice exam because there was a trick to it that was explained in the solution, and I ran into the same scenario on the exam - no guarantee I got that one right though!