April 09 Exam - Chemical

[KC_Rider]

I've been preparing for the April '09 exam using the PPI materials and wondered how others were coming along. With 4 weeks remaining, I too have serious concerns about my level of preparedness. Haven't seen any ChE activity on this board since Jan '09, so I thought that I would try and stimulate some discussion. Would like to hear from any ChE's out there. Thanks!

 

[snickerd3]

I've been preparing for the April '09 exam using the PPI materials and wondered how others were coming along. With 4 weeks remaining, I too have serious concerns about my level of preparedness. Haven't seen any ChE activity on this board since Jan '09, so I thought that I would try and stimulate some discussion. Would like to hear from any ChE's out there. Thanks!

Don't remember what the PPI materials consisted of, but the Lindburg ChE reference manual and practice problems are a good set of tools. I basically just worked those and 6min problems. They will over prepare you for the test. So don't get bummed if parts of them are kicking your butt. I know they kicked mine. Just remember the test is written for a scienticfic calculator, and about 6 minutes a problem. If your train of thought goes beyond those two things you are approaching the problem the wrong way. Pay attention to units! Several problems ended up literally being a simple unit conversion.

 

[KC_Rider]

Don't remember what the PPI materials consisted of, but the Lindburg ChE reference manual and practice problems are a good set of tools. I basically just worked those and 6min problems. They will over prepare you for the test. So don't get bummed if parts of them are kicking your butt. I know they kicked mine. Just remember the test is written for a scienticfic calculator, and about 6 minutes a problem. If your train of thought goes beyond those two things you are approaching the problem the wrong way. Pay attention to units! Several problems ended up literally being a simple unit conversion.

Thanks for the note snickerd3. Yeah, you pretty much described the situation accurately. At this point, I am going to continue to keep cranking on all of the various problems. After awhile, it does appear that it is sinking in. Thanks again!

 

[rudy]

snickerd is right... pay attention to the units. I practiced by circling the given units in the problem, and putting a square around the units in the answer choices.

The 6th edition ChERM has some extra material not required in the NCEES ChE topics list. Stick to what's on the list.

The 5th edition ChERM has a better kinetics section. Chemical Reaction Engineering by Levenspiel is also good for kinetics. There is quite a bit of information in this book... again just stick to what's on the NCEES ChE topics list.

Practicing problems from the NCEES ChE practice exam will help. If you haven't done so already, try to mimic exam conditions by doing mock exams on the weekends. I started off slow.. half-day mock exams (took half days off from work and sometimes on the weekends), and then progressed to full day mock exams on the weekends.

Hoping you do well in your preparation and exam.

 

[KC_Rider]

snickerd is right... pay attention to the units. I practiced by circling the given units in the problem, and putting a square around the units in the answer choices.
The 6th edition ChERM has some extra material not required in the NCEES ChE topics list. Stick to what's on the list.

The 5th edition ChERM has a better kinetics section. Chemical Reaction Engineering by Levenspiel is also good for kinetics. There is quite a bit of information in this book... again just stick to what's on the NCEES ChE topics list.

Practicing problems from the NCEES ChE practice exam will help. If you haven't done so already, try to mimic exam conditions by doing mock exams on the weekends. I started off slow.. half-day mock exams (took half days off from work and sometimes on the weekends), and then progressed to full day mock exams on the weekends.

Hoping you do well in your preparation and exam.

Thanks for the input Rudy. Fortunately, I do have Levenspiel. That was the book we used in school. I've been using the PPI tools to prepare. I noticed that you included the Das texts for your preparation. Seems like that would have been very useful too. Well, down to the final count now. I'm going [back] through all of the problems again: Mass/Energy Bal, Fluids, Heat, Kinetics, Mass Xfr, and Plant Design/Operations. It's coming a bit quicker the second time around. I just hope I can get it all down within the next 12 days given my day job.

 

[rudy]

A friend of mine passed on her first try using only PPI's CheRM 5th edition and accompanying practice problems. Another friend of mine passed on her first try too using only PPI's ChERM 6th edition, accomanying practice problems, and an AiChe Kinetics pocket book. So, it is possible to pass with only these books.

I tried doing the same thing, but believe my mistake was reviewing theories on all the topics in the entire ChERM 6th edition, instead of focusing on working out problems that were listed in NCEES ChE topics list. The last (and passing) time I took it, I decided to work out all the problems, that related to the NCEES ChE topics list, that I could get my hands on.

The Das texts were useful, because they provided extra problems to work on, although I didn't have time work out as many as I would have liked. The ChERM and Levenspiel should have sufficient problems for practice.

If you still have your Plant Design book from school, I'd recommend you take that. I was out of school for so long, and the ChE exam topics did not relate to my job (semiconductors). The index of my old Plant Design book was very useful to look up terms (that I had long forgotten).... terms that I quickly needed to know the definition to understand the problem.