@vickass &
@navixv
How did your study approach/method change for the retake?
I've got all my study material organzied. I know I need to get better on the practice exams for one thing.
Thanks,
Brip
First time around I had the following references: NEC, NESC, Complex Imaginary, Spin-Up, Graffeo's Engineering Guide, Wildi Electrical Machines and Drives, and miscellaneous pdfs printed out and put in a binder.
Second time, I bought Camaras Engineering Guide (not bad to have as a backup reference though I spent no time studying it), Power Systems Analysis by Grainger and Stevenson (I didn't read this but used it during the exam to answer a couple questions, useful), and a new practice exam I found (
http://www.engproguides.com/powerexam.html).
I highly recommend that exam linked above. Also, NCEES has released a new practice exam so it's worth getting that.
My studying strategy the second time was this: First I went through the Spin-Up practice exams pretty quickly. This is a very easy practice book which I used to as a warm-up to get back in the studying mindset after a little while off. Then, I actually sat down and read a textbook for the first time in my life. Even in college I didn't really read textbooks. I read through most of Wildi's book and tabbed each section in the important chapters (transformers, transmission and distribution, and generators/motors). Obviously this took a while. While I didn't necessarily learn everything I read, when it came time to answer questions, I was able to recall familiar sections and referred back to them using tabs/index. Then after reading, I simply did practice problems for about a month. Complex Imaginary is decent so I went through all four exams, then the exam linked above and the ncees exam. The key to doing practice problems is actually understanding the problems and solutions. It's not enough to answer a practice problem, you have to actually understand why the answer is correct and why the other answers are incorrect. So I used my references to find the answers and tried to expand on the solutions.