CBT PE exam result
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I took my exam on a Friday and received my results through NCEES the next Wednesday.
CBT results come out the Wednesday the week after the exam is taken. IIRC its at 11AM eastern. So the wait is anywhere from 4-11 days.
I took the CBT on a Thursday, and got my results the following Wednesday. I received the e-mail from NCEES at 10:01, although I didn't check my e-mail until 10:15, and logged onto NCEES five minutes letter to check the results.
DBLM10
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Did you take CBT PE STRUCTURE ? How was it? Did they give you all the reference materials, full versions of codes?
DBLM10
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Did you take CBT PE STRUCTURE? How was it? Did they give you all the reference materials, full versions of codes?
Eng_Girl95
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I took the electrical power CBT.
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I took the CBT PE - Mechanical (HVAC & Refrigeration). Since it's computer based, the only available resource is the reference booklet (PDF). However, there were some questions that were definitely not on that PDF that i just had to just guess on. I'm slightly curious to know what my passing score was but then again, i passed and that's all that matters!
I’ll go ahead and get this started… Yesterday I took the PE Civil Structural CBT and I’ll write a little review as it looks like people are very anxious to see what the new format is like… To start, I took the paper exam a few times so I will compare the two..
As you guys know, the test has changed a lot, I won’t go into detail about the check in process as it is similar to the CBT FE exam (and video that NCEES provides). I’ll start at when I sat down to take the test…
First the reference manuals - ALL reference manuals listed as required material are available and you can pull up at any time during the exam (yes even in the morning portion). The general reference is also provided. The references were OK, as some were very organized in chapters and you can pull up one chapter at a time - others were poorly organized and were bookmarked by key sections. There is a page up and page down feature so you can jump from page to page but it was VERY laggy and took a second to bring up each page.. You can ONLY bring up one reference manual at a time.
Now to the actual test…The morning exam started out like a normal paper exam but quickly turned to a “WTF is this”. The paper exams that I have taken were very “cookie cutter” - for example you knew you were getting 40 questions in the morning and 7 of said questions were going to be water resource questions.. Well you can throw that right out the window for the CBT. The questions were all over the place- I had 41 questions before my scheduled break and oh don’t assume all those 41 questions are typical morning questions like on the paper exam - I had “afternoon structural depth” questions in those 41 questions - yeah I said WTF too!
One very nice feature that is different than the paper exam, is that you CAN take as much or as little time on the morning questions and have extra/less time for the afternoon portion (note that you can’t go back to the morning after you take your break).. I used this to my advantage.. let me take a side and say that I was VERY prepared for this exam - I studied basically every day for the last 3 years.. With that being said, I felt the morning was pretty straight forward (aside from the depth questions that were thrown in). I looked at the reference manual very little as most questions were conceptual. My goal was to leave at least 5 hours for the depth portion. I ended the morning with 5.5 hours left on the clock…
Now to the afternoon structural depth.. And all I can say is WOW! Again, I left myself a solid 5.5 hours to complete the depth and I used every single minute of it.. I truly believe that a PHD in structural engineering could NOT complete the structural afternoon in 4 hours.. There were ZERO “gimme” questions. EVERY SINGLE QUESTION needed one of the manuals… I was very familiar with the manuals and it still took an average of 3-5 minutes to navigate to the correct page in the manual. And oh yeah the “searchable” feature is a waste of time in my opinion. I tried to search one question and it brought up about 2000 hits - can’t go through that many in 6 minutes.
I really think the NCEES dropped the ball on the structural depth and is getting a little out of hand.. Tricky question after tricky question, and asking questions that NOBODY does in the structural engineering field.. I took probably 10 practice exams INCLUDING an SE Vertical practice exam and ALL of those were much simpler than this test.
Anyways - hopefully you guys like the review - I think I’m the first to post about the new CBT PE Civil Exam..
As you guys know, the test has changed a lot, I won’t go into detail about the check in process as it is similar to the CBT FE exam (and video that NCEES provides). I’ll start at when I sat down to take the test…
First the reference manuals - ALL reference manuals listed as required material are available and you can pull up at any time during the exam (yes even in the morning portion). The general reference is also provided. The references were OK, as some were very organized in chapters and you can pull up one chapter at a time - others were poorly organized and were bookmarked by key sections. There is a page up and page down feature so you can jump from page to page but it was VERY laggy and took a second to bring up each page.. You can ONLY bring up one reference manual at a time.
Now to the actual test…The morning exam started out like a normal paper exam but quickly turned to a “WTF is this”. The paper exams that I have taken were very “cookie cutter” - for example you knew you were getting 40 questions in the morning and 7 of said questions were going to be water resource questions.. Well you can throw that right out the window for the CBT. The questions were all over the place- I had 41 questions before my scheduled break and oh don’t assume all those 41 questions are typical morning questions like on the paper exam - I had “afternoon structural depth” questions in those 41 questions - yeah I said WTF too!
One very nice feature that is different than the paper exam, is that you CAN take as much or as little time on the morning questions and have extra/less time for the afternoon portion (note that you can’t go back to the morning after you take your break).. I used this to my advantage.. let me take a side and say that I was VERY prepared for this exam - I studied basically every day for the last 3 years.. With that being said, I felt the morning was pretty straight forward (aside from the depth questions that were thrown in). I looked at the reference manual very little as most questions were conceptual. My goal was to leave at least 5 hours for the depth portion. I ended the morning with 5.5 hours left on the clock…
Now to the afternoon structural depth.. And all I can say is WOW! Again, I left myself a solid 5.5 hours to complete the depth and I used every single minute of it.. I truly believe that a PHD in structural engineering could NOT complete the structural afternoon in 4 hours.. There were ZERO “gimme” questions. EVERY SINGLE QUESTION needed one of the manuals… I was very familiar with the manuals and it still took an average of 3-5 minutes to navigate to the correct page in the manual. And oh yeah the “searchable” feature is a waste of time in my opinion. I tried to search one question and it brought up about 2000 hits - can’t go through that many in 6 minutes.
I really think the NCEES dropped the ball on the structural depth and is getting a little out of hand.. Tricky question after tricky question, and asking questions that NOBODY does in the structural engineering field.. I took probably 10 practice exams INCLUDING an SE Vertical practice exam and ALL of those were much simpler than this test.
Anyways - hopefully you guys like the review - I think I’m the first to post about the new CBT PE Civil Exam..
DBLM10
Member
First of all, I would like to wish you all the best for your result. Wooww, that's entirely different from the paper-based Structural PE exam. They are making it harder to pass this time, Yes, you were the first to post about the CBT PE exam. Thank you for helping us out. Good luck.
I am in a similar situation. I took the paper based PE Civil Structural Exam last October (48/80 for the curious people) and recently took the CBT version late last week. Although, I wouldn't say I was anywhere near 3 years of preparedness; I was very ready for the exam. I agree with what you say about the morning portion. I took my time and used all of the 4 hours I planned on using to make sure I had no silly mistakes. Working in structures the field had me more than ready for the morning structures questions that were thrown out there.
The afternoon was a time-crunch to say the least! Unless you know exactly where to look for the conceptual code-specific questions, you will be scrolling for days on end because of the amount of returns the search bar gave me. Personally, I had to basically guess on quite a few questions as I spent too much time scrolling (BTW scrolling was snail-like) to the sections that I needed to get to. I would double-down on your advice and leave no less than 5 hours for the second half.
Hopefully the "cut score" adjusts for the amount of time is used to scroll through the sections. Looking forward to the test results and can only hope for a better result this time.
Last edited:
steel
Well-known member
NCEES has been very transparent with the fact that the exam is not necessarily split evenly with the number of questions in the morning versus afternoon. Only 70 problems are scored. The other 10 you saw were experimental. So, if 6 were breadth content and 4 were depth content, that means your morning session would have 41 questions (70 / 2 + 6).
Also, you might be confusing structural depth questions with the "Structural Mechanics" section in the morning. Some of those, even on the P&P last October, I found to be good candidates for the afternoon section! SO it's not out the question for NCEES to throw in depth questions in the morning portion.
Like searching any pdf or website, you have to know what to search for. Otherwise, yeah, you're gonna get thousands of results. My approach for the exam in a few weeks is going to be search for keywords, methods, chapter titles, etc. Not sure how general you were making your searches, though, so I could be off here.
100% agree with this. For example, say you are looking for a specific bending moment diagram and don't exactly remember the table number in the AISC code or even the part/chapter for whatever reason. Searching "moment diagram" won't get you anywhere, neither will "shear" "moment" or "deflection" but they are all within the table title. You have to either memorize the relative locations within the codes or use the index. Which resorting to indexing defeats the purpose of tabbing your book for the old version of the test.
Not saying any structural engineer would not know where to find a moment diagram or how to quickly create one. This example was only for everyone's information on the additional steps that are now required for the CBT test. Overall, I like the accessibility of the new version of the test. There are new learning curves that every test taker will have to become accustomed to.
I understand what you mean. And at first I thought the same thing.. That it is just a harder “structural mechanics” question. Without getting into any specifics. Last time I checked, the morning structural mechanics questions didn’t require the use of a “structural depth” design manual that wouldn’t be available to someone who wasn’t taking the structural depth.. maybe I should have been more clear on that.. but trust me I wasn’t confusing the two… Agree with the searchable feature, maybe I just wasn’t well versed in it. But also remember, the NCEES knows people are banking on searching something to quickly get the answer and they can’t allow anything to be that easy (I might be a tad biased). So my point was, don’t bank on it being very helpful..
steel
Well-known member
I disagree. They cannot change the content of the codes they give you. So it isn't really up to them to decide how easy searching is. They have very rigid rules for the questions they can ask you. For example, they can't give you a basic question on shear and moment diagrams and then intentionally make it difficult to find the page with the diagrams in the steel manual. And I've done CBT exams before when it was the FE and I found the search feature extremely easy to use and helpful.
Also, I think having some "depth" questions in the structural mechanics portion actually plays to our (structurals') strength! Since we'll be given the steel manual, that's an extra resource we have that can potentially give us an advantage over the other disciplines taking the same morning session on the same day at the same place. But that was true for the P&P too. A geotech that didn't bring the steel manual would be at the same disadvantage they'd be at today.
civilrobot PE etc etc
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Congrats!!!
Thanks for the review!
Would you say in general that the order of the questions followed the major categories found in the exam spec? CE-Const found here. IIRC the order is supposed to flow directly from the spec.
FYI to all: the number of questions in each spec is also listed in the exam spec. But they do a poor job explaining what that range actually means. The smaller number is the bare minimum of questions one may expect from that category. The larger number is +50% of that smaller number and is the maximum number of questions that may be from that category. One should probably expect to see more than the minimum for each section.
You won't see the maximum from each category because their is an upper limit to the number of questions on a given exam. CE is now maxed at 80 questions, but IIRC other exams max out at 85.
I've read elsewhere that there are "experimental" questions on the exam but I have yet to see anything official from NCEES on the existence of experimental PPE problems, nor the number of graded vs ungraded questions on any given exam. I haven't found anything about it on their website. Examinees should attempt each question as if it is graded.
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