Guidance on Dealing with Codes for Civil-Structural Depth

[itinerant]

Hello,

I had opted for the Civil - Structural depth discipline in the April-14 PE exam and I didn't make it. As it happens I was a massive flop in the depth portion of the test. And in retrospect when I look at the attempt, one of my main weakness was the questions that dealt with the codes. Now the structural discipline comes with its unfairly large share of codes, and I was wondering how did the guys who passed the test with the same depth deal with those questions.

I would appreciate the feedback about these codes, since I know for sure that not everybody who passed read all the codes cover to cover with notes made out. I had read those codes, but I guess it wasn't enough. So I would really welcome suggestions and approaches to anyone who can let me know how they had studied with the various questions related to the codes ACI, ASCE, IBC, AASHTO, PCI and god knows there are some more.

 

[Porter_]

this is relevant to my interests, subscribing to this thread.

 

[Jake47]

I passed the Civil-Structural depth exam in April so this information should be relevant.

I am not the type of person who can sit down, read 10,000+ pages of codes, understand every word in them, and remember exactly what was written. So I took the approach of knowing how to locate the information in a timely manner. For instance, with the IBC and AASHTO I moved the indexes of each code to the front of the binder so it took less time to look up the answers. Then I tabbed what I thought were the most important sections and made simple notes/highlights in the indexes to cross reference the particular page within the section. All told, this maybe took 3 hours (while watching a little NCAA tournament action) to make locating the important information much quicker. There was a question from one of these respective codes on the exam in which I looked in the index, saw the highlighted item, jumped to the page, and answered the question in about 45 seconds. Obviously this was a lucky situation, but I felt like I had several similar situations like this.

The other codes, ACI, AISC, NDS, MSJC I use more frequently and just have a good general idea where things are located. If you don't work regularly with these, it may be a little more difficult, but reading through the section headings/table of contents will give you a general idea where to look.

One piece of advice that I can give (and maybe you already know this) is to go through the test once rather quickly. I was able to knock about 22 questions out in the first hour, 9 in the second and that left me with 2 hours to solve 9 problems and check all my work.

If you have any more questions feel free to ask, or PM me and I can help out with anything else!