I just took the CBT FE yesterday. I never took the pencil and paper exam but I studied using the Lindeburg FE exam review book which is still geared towards the old test.
First, the new reference handbook is pretty different. Your screen is split with the handbook in PDF form on the left and the test question on the right. What is nice about the PDF is that there are two tabs - one with a search bar that returns every location of the keyword you type in and one with a hyperlinked table of contents. I found it very easy to navigate the handbook and find the equations and charts I needed. The main downside to the digital handbook is when a question requires you to use a graph. For the MechE FE, I had to use the Psychrometric and Moody graphs. Theyre very busy graphs and I kept losing my place because I couldnt mark it up with a pencil.
The test material itself is much more geared toward your major than the general knowledge questions I studied in the review book. My personal experience was that the general questions were pretty straightforward but there were some in-depth MechE questions which I wasn't fully prepared for. Luckily the handbook was a huge help and I was able to work through them.
If you havent taken a test at a testing center such as Pearson before, its a pretty different experience. Be prepared to not be able to bring anything into the test center except your calculator (no cover) and your photo ID. They take your photo and give you palm scans every time you enter and leave the room. They will also make you turn out your pockets. You can't have food or water in the test room but you can raise your hand and leave at any time. I only left during my alotted 25 minute break at the midway point and it was more than enough time to rest and recuperate.
One hidden benefit that I found to the new testing system is that it seems like the computer grabs questions from a "question bank" for each subject. Unlike the old exam which was curated as a whole, I found that I had a couple of questions which were pretty similar to one another. For example, two questions requiring the use of the same equation but with slightly different givens and asking you to solve for a different missing variable. I'm not sure if this was typical of the old test too. It felt like a result of the test being randomly generated as I progressed from question bank to question bank.
