Hey Matt. I got the 8 hour and seismic but not surveying. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
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Couple things that really helped me for survey: I have used the HP35s since college and purchased a book to program a bunch of routines into the calculator and then used the routines the whole time I was doing practice problems- this didn't really give me more accuracy but it enabled me to speed up considerably. I think the programming is predicated on running the calculator in RPN but that's how I roll anyway so it works for me.
PPI has a survey definitions book- buy it. That book alone probably helped me on 5+ questions.
If you took a geomatics class in college and took notes or have good text resources from the classes I'd say review them.
Then pick up the PPI sample tests, I think there are two tests in a single book (120 questions total), as well as their practice problems book.
I'd say do all of the problems in January (DO NOT write in the book), take a break, then do them all again in February/March without cheating on the problems and see where you're at. If say for instance you can do a large percentage of the problems in the 120 questions book without cheating then you're probably in good shape but hitting all those concepts twice in a row practice-wise helped me a lot to retain the approach to problems in the test.
Also- I got back in the habit of showing my work very deliberately; I have a tendency to work things out in scratch when studying and then it's very difficult to go back and catch mistakes if I don't come up with the correct answer. Draw things out and show steps so you can review your own work. This is admittedly a balancing act for time on the exam but when I was practicing I didn't concern myself with time as much as concept/process/execution/answer.
I also picked up the PPI Survey textbook but it wasn't incredibly useful to me for most of both tests. I did flip to it a couple times but I honestly probably used my CERM on the survey exam more.
On test day
do not spend time on problems you can't do right away. Take the time to read every single problem, even if you don't have that lightbulb moment while you're reading, then skip back and hit every problem you're confident in figuring out. I had to skip 5 or so problems because they were so tough to figure out, glean meaningful information from a half page of text, but still passed using this strategy.
If/when I think of more I'll ping you again. Study focused!