Exam Rant!

[Gstei]

Ok so I am just here to vent my overall frustration with these two state specific exams! I understand that at least some of the material is applicable to performing engineering work in California, but it makes no sense to me why we have to complete the exam in such a short amount of time. Just because someone is able to answer 55 seismic or survey questions in under 3 mins per question does not, in my opinion, mean anything other than you are good test taker. How does this translate to the real world?? At work, or with any real engineering problem, we will have much more than 3 minutes to try and find a reasonable solution. Furthermore, having to solve the questions so quickly does not give you any time to thoroughly check your answers...how does that translate to good engineering practice?? We, as civil engineers are already bound by the professional practice in such a way that we cannot and should not perform engineering beyond our competence/experience anyways so the addition of the survey and seismic exam just seems like a way for the state to make some more money off our backs! 

...anyways that's my rant...back to studying... 

 

[as_botd]

Checking upper and lower limits for forces in seismic absolutely killed me when doing practice exams. It's like you're rushing through so bad but there is this check you essentially have to do to avoid the risk of gambling on a question not requiring it

 

[n0s0up4u]

I definitely agree with you, but from the Board's perspective, it's also difficult to create an open-book test that both a) can be passed by competent engineers, and b) is not so easy that anyone can pass it.  If they gave you tons of time, pretty much anyone could solve many of these problems - you just need the right tables and references and similar problems to compare it to.  It seems like what they try to do is make it so that it rewards familiarity with the concepts - you can be like "oh I've seen this before" so you're able to solve it faster than someone who had never seen a problem like that.  Then they give you a short time limit, but balance that with only needing to answer a bit more than half of the problems correctly.  Obviously it's not perfect and it does reward good test-takers and people who can solve problems quickly, but I don't know that there's a significantly better way given that they're committed to the "you must pass these 3 tests" approach towards licensure.

That being said, I have lots of problems with the examination process as a whole and the entire idea of licensure and how in civil engineering so much of an emphasis is put on having as many initialisms after your name as possible and how expensive it can be and how that financial burden creates inequity and how there is an entire industry dedicated to profiting off of engineers trying to study and pass the exams to acquire those initialisms, but I won't get into that here...