If you have time and feel so inclined, you might also try “Learning How to Learn” on Coursera - taught by Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski.
I used the course as meta-studying for the PE, because part of the class focuses on how to perform in high-pressure situations and how to get the most out of your studying hours.
I spent about 80 hrs studying and passed (Civil Transportation) on my first attempt. I did zero practice tests and approximately 100 practice problems, the majority of which took between 3 and 6 minutes to solve.
I did not take the EET simulated exam, nor did I time myself on any problems. Nor did I use any practice problems outside of EET or the official NCEES manual for my discipline (I highly recommend getting the construction one!).
The questions most representative of the PE exam ‘easy/moderate’ questions came from the NCEES manual, for me. The slightly more difficult but still routine questions were straight out of EET breadth and depth binders, at least in terms of topic.
The 10-20 most difficult questions on the exam are unpredictable, they would have taken me far more time to solve than 6-10 minutes, so for most of those I didn’t bother or just did my best to tackle the 3-5 hard questions I felt most comfortable attempting to answer.
My first pass of questions, all I did was label them with the topic and a likely concept or reference I thought I would use. I answered two questions on sight. The next pass I did everything I thought was a simple lookup or 30-second or less calculation. The third pass was all the simple calculations (one or two steps that I knew I could get right). The fourth pass was longer calculations I knew I could get right. The fifth pass was either difficult questions I thought I might be able to solve, or questions that looked easier but where I was less comfortable with the subject. The last pass was questions I thought I needed 10+ minutes to solve it that were just tedious or weird.
I used all of my time on the exam and spent time bubbling in answers only between passes, to help me track where I was and to help guide my next pass.
I left no questions unanswered and tried to, where I could not be certain of the correct answer, at least eliminate any apparently illogical, impossible, or unlikely answers (sometimes through algebraic comparison of units, or through calculation of similar forces in a ‘simplified’ parallel model of the problem - Reducing a structure to a simple beam, for instance, and seeing the resulting pattern of forces and moments).
Labeling the questions with topics and likely references helped me focus on questions without needing to re-read the whole thing.
You can do this!
I used the course as meta-studying for the PE, because part of the class focuses on how to perform in high-pressure situations and how to get the most out of your studying hours.
I spent about 80 hrs studying and passed (Civil Transportation) on my first attempt. I did zero practice tests and approximately 100 practice problems, the majority of which took between 3 and 6 minutes to solve.
I did not take the EET simulated exam, nor did I time myself on any problems. Nor did I use any practice problems outside of EET or the official NCEES manual for my discipline (I highly recommend getting the construction one!).
The questions most representative of the PE exam ‘easy/moderate’ questions came from the NCEES manual, for me. The slightly more difficult but still routine questions were straight out of EET breadth and depth binders, at least in terms of topic.
The 10-20 most difficult questions on the exam are unpredictable, they would have taken me far more time to solve than 6-10 minutes, so for most of those I didn’t bother or just did my best to tackle the 3-5 hard questions I felt most comfortable attempting to answer.
My first pass of questions, all I did was label them with the topic and a likely concept or reference I thought I would use. I answered two questions on sight. The next pass I did everything I thought was a simple lookup or 30-second or less calculation. The third pass was all the simple calculations (one or two steps that I knew I could get right). The fourth pass was longer calculations I knew I could get right. The fifth pass was either difficult questions I thought I might be able to solve, or questions that looked easier but where I was less comfortable with the subject. The last pass was questions I thought I needed 10+ minutes to solve it that were just tedious or weird.
I used all of my time on the exam and spent time bubbling in answers only between passes, to help me track where I was and to help guide my next pass.
I left no questions unanswered and tried to, where I could not be certain of the correct answer, at least eliminate any apparently illogical, impossible, or unlikely answers (sometimes through algebraic comparison of units, or through calculation of similar forces in a ‘simplified’ parallel model of the problem - Reducing a structure to a simple beam, for instance, and seeing the resulting pattern of forces and moments).
Labeling the questions with topics and likely references helped me focus on questions without needing to re-read the whole thing.
You can do this!
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