I just passed both on my first attempt, and I thought I would share a few thoughts. I used Hiner's review course for Seismic and CPESR for Surveying, I recommend both, especially Hiner's workbook and quick reference sheets. I also bought an additional three practice exams from AEI, which included Dr. Ibrahim's review video and quick reference sheets. I thought AEI's reference sheets were a little more polished than Hiner's, but they did not have anything as useful as Hiner's colored charts for Sds and Sd1. Both were good. I thought Hiner's practice exams were a little more polished than AEI, but again, both were good.
First of all, speed is the name of the game on both of these exams. Each of these exams are 2.5 hours for 55 questions, or 2.73 min/question. By comparison, the NCEES 8-hr exam is 4 hours with 40 questions for each session, or 6 min/question. This is why practice questions and tests are so important for these exams. When working practice problems for Seismic, I started out by writing my work and extra notes directly into my workbook as I worked the problems, thinking it would be handy to refer back to during the exam. That was before I fully realized the importance of speed, and that I would not have time to be flipping through practice problems during the exam. Sure, a few key notes and important points are fine, but you won't have time to flip through reference material other than looking up a few equations during the exam. In my opinion, it's more important to spend your time making sure you are carefully doing the problems you do know correctly, rather than wasting time looking up problems you don't know (assuming there are only a few you don't know).
Also on the practice exams, you've probably heard that it's good to simulate the exam experience as much as possible - i.e. give yourself 2.5 hours and use only your reference materials. I'll expand on that and say to only use a folded 11x17 sheet of paper, or two letter size sheets of paper (unlined, no graph paper) because this is what you'll get at Prometric. I made the mistake during the first seismic practice exam in the SDR workbook of writing out my work in the workbook, which gave me an unfair advantage of being able to use their figures to sketch on. On the real exam, you'll need to reproduce any figures or sketches on your own scratch paper, so do that during the practice exams as well. I was expecting a pencil at Prometric, but I was given two ball-point pens instead. Not that I would probably waste time erasing a mistake on scratch paper, just scribble it out and start again, but I did practice exams with pen just to simulate that experience as well. I suppose the writing utensil could vary by Prometric location? Hiner mentioned only writing in pen in your reference materials so you couldn't be accused of writing any test material in your books with your Prometric pencil, but I wrote all my notes in pencil in my references anyways. I guess the main tip there is just keep your references away from your scratch paper when writing on your scratch paper, so it doesn't look like you're writing in a reference book.
By now you've undoubtedly seen test strategies such as take a quick pass through the exam solving easy/quick conceptual questions, and categorize the remaining questions as Easy/Medium/Hard, etc. With the time crunch that each of these tests are, multiple passes seemed a little inefficient to me so this is the strategy that I settled on: On the first pass through the exam I answered all conceptual questions and computational questions that I felt I could solve in < 2 min. If it was a concept that I wasn't 100% sure of I clicked my best guess but still flagged it. If it was a computation question that I didn't feel was close enough to one of the multiple choice answers, I guessed and flagged. Any questions that I knew how to do but would take me longer than 2 min, I left blank and flagged, those were my first priority to go back to after my first pass. Any questions that I did not know how to do I left blank and did not flag. I knew I didn't want to waste time trying to figure those out until I had answered all of the longest questions I knew how to do, and most likely I would end up just guessing in the last few minutes anyways. It is slightly risky to leave questions blank as you go through, but the navigation pane on the CBT makes it very clear which questions have not been attempted, and the timer alerts you with 15, 10, and 5 minutes remaining. Don't forget to "unflag" any questions you go back to and are satisfied with your answer, that way you are reducing the number of questions to go back to. At the end of my first pass of the Seismic exam I had about 10-12 questions to go back to and nearly an hour left, so I felt great. After the first pass on the Surveying exam I had about 12-14 to go back to, with just over a half hour left, so I didn't feel as good, but was able to get several solid answers, leaving less than 10 complete guesses.
Rather than retype it here, I'll just reference
my post in a different calculator thread. My main point is to use what you're comfortable with from everyday use, if you do want to upgrade to a TI-89, make sure you use that during all practice problems as well. I also shared a small "
trig cheat sheet" I made in another thread.
The last thing I can think of right now is at the end of each exam, there is a 10-question survey. The first nine questions are on the experience at Prometric, but the last question is an opportunity to note any questions that you thought may have had an error or been poorly written. I don't know how likely errors are during the exams, I suppose they are possible as they must change the questions quarterly(?) so it is worth noting any questions you thought may have had an error. Dr. Ibrahim said when they are analyzing the exam, they throw out any question that less than ⅓ of test takers got correct. I believe he said they also throw out any question that less than ⅓ of the “top performers” got correct.
