CBT PE exam result

[RBHeadge PE]

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.

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).

If the exam committee did their job correctly, then they would have removed from the exam bank all of the questions that could be solved by any literate person and a "ctrl-f". I've heard rumors that that removed a large chunk of questions out of several disciplines' exams.
But removing those questions aren't the same as what you are describing above. The exam designers probably didn't intend for the examinees to need to spend most of their time-budget just scrolling through the PDF. I would hope that that feedback would somehow make it back to NCEES or the exam committee so they can adjust things in the future.

So my point was, don’t bank on it being very helpful..

I've been beating this drum for a couple years now. Examinees should know the supplied PDFs as well as they know their regular resources before taking the exam.

To help answer the thread question, I got my results last night at Tuesday 10:00 p.m. The turn around was a rapid ~4.5 days! I passed!!!

Congratulations!

 

[Ryan0123]

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.

Yes! Good point I forgot to mentioned.. The breadth did follow that format and for the most part had the range of questions for each category… I’ve read the forum where people have mentioned about throwing questions out, but like you said, you have to approach every question like it is being graded.. The depth questions “seemed” all over the place (not in a specific order). The main “wtf moment” in the breadth, was the structural depth questions I had. Maybe those were the throw out questions, I dont know but when you are asking, “Based on design manual X….” That IS a depth problem…that was asked in my first 41 questions before my scheduled break (morning). To me that’s unfair, and someone stated above that “It’s your discipline, you should know it”.. while that is somewhat true, I guarantee if you ask anyone on here if they would rather have a morning breadth problem or a depth problem, they will pick breadth any day of the week!

 

[steel]

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.

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.

I spoke directly with NCEES regarding the experimental questions. There are 10 experimental questions used for research purposes and question-testing, etc. At least on the PE: Civil. So, out of the 80 questions you see, only 70 are scored, but there is absolutely no way to tell which ones are scored.

But, that changes how many questions you see in the first half vs. second half. If 6 of the experimental questions are breadth material, you'll have 70 / 2 + 6 = 41 questions in the first half and 80 - 41 = 39 questions in the second half.

 

[Tim - formerly @ NCEES]

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.

From the examinee guide:



Depending on which topics need items to build up the bank determines where the pretest items are located. That's why there are ranges to each topic.

 

[PhN]

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..

Thank you for the review. You mentioned there are a lot of conceptual questions. How do you study for these conceptual questions?

 

[PhN]

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..

Thank you for the review. You mentioned that there are a lot of conceptual questions. How do you study for these conceptual questions?

 

[civilrobot PE etc etc]

Thank you for the review. You mentioned that there are a lot of conceptual questions. How do you study for these conceptual questions?

I didn't take a CBT, but I studied for and took P+P. You have to understand the topic/subject well enough where you can create your own scenario/example with your own numbers to answer the question. I also drew out the question. If you understand what's being asked and you understand the notes or sections of a reference that you read about that topic, then you should be able to answer the question.

 

[Ryan0123]

Yeah agree with what Civilrobot said above.. You should study to learn/refresh concepts and do practice problems.. if you just did one or the other, I don’t think it would be enough to pass.. basically I followed what the NCEES lays out in their “ exam specifications” (see what Headge shared above) and studied everything I could possibly find on these subjects and every type of problem and ways they can ask these types of problems on the exam…

 

[CCstruct]

I took the Civil: Structural PE CBT on Saturday 2/19 and got my results this morning (the following Wednesday) just after 8am. I had to look in my junk email folder which was weird. I passed on my first attempt. While not every state allows this i highly recommend taking the PE as soon as you can after the FE. I am in my last semester of Masters degree and i took the FE in July. I can only imagine how much harder the breadth section would be after a few years of only structural work! As far as the test i felt less comfortable in the morning breadth part than the structural depth. I had 41 morning questions (so 6 experimental) and 39 afternoon ( 4 exp) after my first pass i flagged about 15 in the morning and 11 afternoon questions i wanted to go back and look at or had no idea. I ended up with only a handful structural where i really wasn’t sure, but 9-12 on the morning part (some were flat out guesses). I felt the structural questions were exceedingly easier than the practice test they provide. Some codes you can search entirely, some you must know the chapter but honestly it was never an issue. You should know the codes well enough especially steel. When it was an issue the index was a huge help. the week of the test i did their 80 question practice test, and i did 3, 40 question timed breadth tests… and that’s it, which is why i recommend taking this sooner than later while all this info is fresh on your mind. For those who don’t have this luxury i would look up how to use every formula in the reference manual you don’t know how to use. Cause beyond that it’s the non calculation theory questions and watching your units under pressure that’s the hard part.

 

[BreEngine]

I took the Civil: Structural PE CBT on Saturday 2/19 and got my results this morning (the following Wednesday) just after 8am. I had to look in my junk email folder which was weird. I passed on my first attempt. While not every state allows this i highly recommend taking the PE as soon as you can after the FE. I am in my last semester of Masters degree and i took the FE in July. I can only imagine how much harder the breadth section would be after a few years of only structural work! As far as the test i felt less comfortable in the morning breadth part than the structural depth. I had 41 morning questions (so 6 experimental) and 39 afternoon ( 4 exp) after my first pass i flagged about 15 in the morning and 11 afternoon questions i wanted to go back and look at or had no idea. I ended up with only a handful structural where i really wasn’t sure, but 9-12 on the morning part (some were flat out guesses). I felt the structural questions were exceedingly easier than the practice test they provide. Some codes you can search entirely, some you must know the chapter but honestly it was never an issue. You should know the codes well enough especially steel. When it was an issue the index was a huge help. the week of the test i did their 80 question practice test, and i did 3, 40 question timed breadth tests… and that’s it, which is why i recommend taking this sooner than later while all this info is fresh on your mind. For those who don’t have this luxury i would look up how to use every formula in the reference manual you don’t know how to use. Cause beyond that it’s the non calculation theory questions and watching your units under pressure that’s the hard part.

Congratulations!

 

[DBLM10]

To help answer the thread question, I got my results last night at Tuesday 10:00 p.m. The turn around was a rapid ~4.5 days! I passed!!!

Congrats !!! Thanks for the review.

 

[DBLM10]

I took the Civil: Structural PE CBT on Saturday 2/19 and got my results this morning (the following Wednesday) just after 8am. I had to look in my junk email folder which was weird. I passed on my first attempt. While not every state allows this i highly recommend taking the PE as soon as you can after the FE. I am in my last semester of Masters degree and i took the FE in July. I can only imagine how much harder the breadth section would be after a few years of only structural work! As far as the test i felt less comfortable in the morning breadth part than the structural depth. I had 41 morning questions (so 6 experimental) and 39 afternoon ( 4 exp) after my first pass i flagged about 15 in the morning and 11 afternoon questions i wanted to go back and look at or had no idea. I ended up with only a handful structural where i really wasn’t sure, but 9-12 on the morning part (some were flat out guesses). I felt the structural questions were exceedingly easier than the practice test they provide. Some codes you can search entirely, some you must know the chapter but honestly it was never an issue. You should know the codes well enough especially steel. When it was an issue the index was a huge help. the week of the test i did their 80 question practice test, and i did 3, 40 question timed breadth tests… and that’s it, which is why i recommend taking this sooner than later while all this info is fresh on your mind. For those who don’t have this luxury i would look up how to use every formula in the reference manual you don’t know how to use. Cause beyond that it’s the non calculation theory questions and watching your units under pressure that’s the hard part.

Congratulations!

 

[steel]

Just got out of the PE Civil: Structural exam!

First impressions:
1) DAMN they made the morning session more difficult. Significantly more conceptual questions than I thought there would be, and more difficult than the last two times I took it (Apr and Oct 2021).
2) I love how the 8-hour clock starts on the first questions and only pauses for your 50-minute break after you finish the first 40 (+/-) questions. I had 41 in the first half, and 39 in the second. I managed to complete the first session in 3 hours which gave me plenty of time for the second session, but I still finished with an hour left.
3) The markers they give you for the dry erase notepads are absolute ****. Leave the cap off for 2 minutes and it dries out. Also, the tips break off easily. But you raise it in the air and they give you another one. But seriously, invest in some better markets, Pearson.

Overall, I am confident that I got about 25 right in the morning and between 25-30 on the afternoon. The worst case scenario where I got all 10 “experimental” questions right still nets me a 40-45 out of 70 scores questions. Hopefully that’s enough.
Also, weird glitch with the NDS 2015, where the “le” for effective length was not showing up in the reference. The e was there, but the “l” was not. Brought it up to the people there and they said they’d let NCEES know.

 

[DLD PE]

Just got out of the PE Civil: Structural exam!

First impressions:
1) DAMN they made the morning session more difficult. Significantly more conceptual questions than I thought there would be, and more difficult than the last two times I took it (Apr and Oct 2021).
2) I love how the 8-hour clock starts on the first questions and only pauses for your 50-minute break after you finish the first 40 (+/-) questions. I had 41 in the first half, and 39 in the second. I managed to complete the first session in 3 hours which gave me plenty of time for the second session, but I still finished with an hour left.
3) The markers they give you for the dry erase notepads are absolute ****. Leave the cap off for 2 minutes and it dries out. Also, the tips break off easily. But you raise it in the air and they give you another one. But seriously, incest in some better markets, Pearson.

Overall, I am confident that I got about 25 right in the morning and between 25-30 on the afternoon. The worst case scenario where I got all 10 “experimental” questions right still nets me a 40-45 out of 70 scores questions. Hopefully that’s enough.
Also, weird glitch with the NDS 2015, where the “le” for effective length was not showing up in the reference. The e was there, but the “l” was not. Brought it up to the people there and they said they’d let NCEES know.

Hey Steel, good luck! Hope you get a positive result next week!

 

[CCstruct]

Just got out of the PE Civil: Structural exam!

First impressions:
1) DAMN they made the morning session more difficult. Significantly more conceptual questions than I thought there would be, and more difficult than the last two times I took it (Apr and Oct 2021).
2) I love how the 8-hour clock starts on the first questions and only pauses for your 50-minute break after you finish the first 40 (+/-) questions. I had 41 in the first half, and 39 in the second. I managed to complete the first session in 3 hours which gave me plenty of time for the second session, but I still finished with an hour left.
3) The markers they give you for the dry erase notepads are absolute ****. Leave the cap off for 2 minutes and it dries out. Also, the tips break off easily. But you raise it in the air and they give you another one. But seriously, incest in some better markets, Pearson.

Overall, I am confident that I got about 25 right in the morning and between 25-30 on the afternoon. The worst case scenario where I got all 10 “experimental” questions right still nets me a 40-45 out of 70 scores questions. Hopefully that’s enough.
Also, weird glitch with the NDS 2015, where the “le” for effective length was not showing up in the reference. The e was there, but the “l” was not. Brought it up to the people there and they said they’d let NCEES know.

Took the same test on the 19th and i felt the same way about the first half of the test. Hadn’t taken it before but felt like the breadth material was overall harder than the structural. Thought the structural was way easier than the sample test they gave out. Personally if i had to take it again i would use more time on the morning than afternoon. I too had 41 and 39. Good luck!

 

[PassPE]

We wish everyone Good Luck on the CBT Exams!

 

[Pra4surf1]

Just got out of the PE Civil: Structural exam!

First impressions:
1) DAMN they made the morning session more difficult. Significantly more conceptual questions than I thought there would be, and more difficult than the last two times I took it (Apr and Oct 2021).
2) I love how the 8-hour clock starts on the first questions and only pauses for your 50-minute break after you finish the first 40 (+/-) questions. I had 41 in the first half, and 39 in the second. I managed to complete the first session in 3 hours which gave me plenty of time for the second session, but I still finished with an hour left.
3) The markers they give you for the dry erase notepads are absolute ****. Leave the cap off for 2 minutes and it dries out. Also, the tips break off easily. But you raise it in the air and they give you another one. But seriously, incest in some better markets, Pearson.

Overall, I am confident that I got about 25 right in the morning and between 25-30 on the afternoon. The worst case scenario where I got all 10 “experimental” questions right still nets me a 40-45 out of 70 scores questions. Hopefully that’s enough.
Also, weird glitch with the NDS 2015, where the “le” for effective length was not showing up in the reference. The e was there, but the “l” was not. Brought it up to the people there and they said they’d let NCEES know.

Fingers crossed charger hope you got it done this time!!

 

[zachmccormick33]

Good luck!

 

[Katelyn Benoit]

Has anyone that has retaken or taken the PE Civil Structural recently went through EET review course for CBT review for the breadth? I'm currently doing their EET review on demand for the breadth and was curious if anyone found it to really prepare them for the CBT version now.

 

[Dasdbomb]

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..

I also just took the structural test and found out that I failed by like 3-4 points and makes me want to explode. I can definitely handle not passing something, my high school career was full of it. My problem is that the questions on the “structural” test , had very little to do with structures. At my work I consistently design structures and own and run a consulting company. I have other people review and stamp my designs that work with me.
The questions were so frustrating and not only not typical structural questions, they were no in the fashion of design and so you didn’t know what to disregard as had already been performed in calculations. For example confusion they would not tell you if the load was factored or service in some questions. That’s just a small example. The rest of the example was scattered with lots of project planning questions, water and transportation problems and not just the basics either it had some stuff that I felt was beyond breadth study material. I literally didn’t perform one design the entire test. Not a concrete beam not anything. The closest thing to a design question I got had to do with deflection and the computer screen was so blurry I had a really hard time readying the proper deflection formula to isolate MOI. Even the testing evnvironment sucks. It’s literally like a jail pod and you are hungry and thirsty the whole time a forget about it if you smoke. Ex smoker here but I still hit an electronic cigarette during the day and they wouldn’t let me do anything but escort me to take a piss.

I’m bitter AF about this as I design things using hand calculations almost everyday in multiple different materials and that knowledge was pretty much useless for that test. I will know how to prepare next time and that is a huge waste of my time because I will never need to know to inspect a column for fire retardation. My advice, I even did the PPi review corse and the study materials were way off from what was on the test. I felt like I got tested on everything that I don’t use for designing structures. Only good thing is I can take it sooner than 6 months. But who the **** wants to subject themselves to that pressure and loss of time to study about **** that is useless. No engineers should work outside their discipline anyways.