Hello all. I am a 4th time PE exam but I am still preparing myself to finally pass

[CivilPEMike]

Focus on the morning -

 

[piscescon]

You have done a wonderful work.Amazing, congratulations!!!

Could you please teach me your strategy?

My strategy was to get 36 in AM + 20 in PM (give up about 15 problems in PM and just guess)

 

[djtea]

Best of luck to you! Wishing you the best.

 

[asmiraut]

My work experiences are very broad but shallow. I’ve never done any actual structural design using US codes. I’m almost a civil guy not structural. I chose structural depth because I’m running a structural engineering firm now. I’m a newbie with very good engineering concepts. The PM problems looked simple and straightforward but I couldn’t find the right pages in my books. It really sucks because I’m not familiar with all the structural codes. However, I passed with my strategy. I knew I had 80% chance to pass before I took the exam.

Wow!! congratulations... Could you please share your secret?

 

[EngineerDisaster]

I passed on my third shot a few years ago. I took the PPI review course twice, in my opinion, this course teaches you more like the whole exam is a PM. The third time I took the School of PE course which seemed more practical to me. Like a lot of people said above, I aimed to do really well in the morning session, and then pushed through the afternoon. I took civil construction as my job requires me to be more of a generalist.

 

[Gato 93]

I have taken the PE three times and failed. My next opportunity will be on 2021 but on CBT mode. Will it be more difficult?

Which exam are you taking? What is your foundational knowledge base?

I took the Civil Water Resources exam last fall. Last time I took a college engineering course was 1994. I do use some engineering daily in my career. I was fortunate that I worked on a concrete structural design using ACI-350 and the PCA manual in the past year — I actually know the material and how to use it, as I did all calculations and wrote the construction specifications from scratch.

A coworker had passed with over a 90 several years back. I used his old material from PPI — the CERM, practice problems, etc. I did buy an extra set of practice problems.
I did all the basic review problems in the CERM practice (Like Chapter 1 & 2) to refresh my math skills, get used to my new calculator, etc. I had not seen a matrices since linear algebra in college. As I did practice problems, I knew that transportation questions, survey questions and shear bending moments were my weaknesses. I never had a transportation course and rarely use the others— so I worked problems, searched internet for additional resources, videos, etc. (be careful as some don’t always have the correct answer). I had a pretty good idea from practice test reviews the types of practice questions that would be on the exam… some code questions in practice problems would throw me for a loop. For each of these subjects, I used a spiral bound notebook. At the front, I created a chart with the question material- like simple beam loading — then next to it, I wrote out which reference materials contained that practice problem or subject matter. I worked problems in the back. I also kept a separate section with equations used. Ideally, I would have numbered all pages in the spiral and had a table of contents. So when I came to a transportation problem, I looked down the list of problems that I had worked, could pull the appropriate reference material and flip to the page quickly to see an example problem solved. I also bound a copy of the CERM index, which I used for 2-3 questions.

A professor told me 10 years ago at a conference that when I finally took the exam to watch my units and unit conversions. I think that was a helpful tip.

Thank goodness the young man behind me warned me to check my watch and the time right before the exam and that I bought an actual watch the night before… because of this tip, I got through all questions in the morning… just barely. For the afternoon, I ran out of time, but did get through all except 1 or 2.

Where appropriate, I would sub the answers gIvan into the known equation and see if the equation balanced… rather than trying to solve the equation to arrive at an answer.

When I left the morning session, I was comfortable until I visited with another exam taker and knew I made some stupid errors! And thinking through some of the problems later… I think there are some more that I missed. After the afternoon session, one of the more challenging questions was related to my direct line of work… this session was a challenge… but review the outline and there are likely several easy areas that working through some problems and having the correct references is key like Engineering Economics. I was pretty sure that I failed when I left. There were 3-4 questions that I had no idea how to work, these were questions that even if I had studied longer - I would have never practiced those problems. Much to my surprise I passed. 25+ years following graduation.