Littlegrooves
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First time poster; thought I’d provide input on my PE prep.
Background is that I took the Oct, 2015 PE for Civil, WR/Env and passed on my first attempt.
Books that I picked up for practice problems:
To begin with, I picked up a bunch of second hand Lindeburg PE Prep books. I just wanted to get my hands on as much material as I could. I didn’t use most these books, as I later found them to be outdated (4th and 5th editions) in terms of problem-style as I got into it. The main book I used was Lindeburg’s Practice Problems for the Civil Engineering PE Exam (9th Ed, 2003.) It’s an enormous book and has tons of problems and I snagged it for $9.98. Yeah, it’s old, but it has good problems in it.
I borrowed SMS for Construction and WR and didn’t touch them. I borrowed the NCEES practice PE Exam for WR/Env (2011) and it found it to be invaluable. I ordered the NCEES practice PE Exam WE/Env (2014), which was fantastic. I picked up the NCEES practice PE Exam for Env (2011) only and found it to be too in-depth and esoteric for the Env problems I thought were likely on the test and I didn’t use it.
Practice regime was as follows:
I started studying in April. I knew it was early to begin, but I wanted to enjoy the process and not feel pressed for time if anything came up (some family stuff did come up, so I’m glad I did start early). I spend a couple hours a few nights a week studying to begin with and ramped it up at the end. I would re-work problems that I got wrong, so I could spend a study day (i.e. a couple hours) on a problem. If I was totally lost, then I would look at the solution.
I ended up working through:
I focused my studying based on the proportion of and types of questions provided on the NCEES website.
I took a classroom review course at my old grad school that my job paid for and I found it to be fairly useless to me, as I had already reviewed the concepts by then. It would have been a good review if I hadn’t been studying for a few months prior.
The key for me:
I found the key to studying was that I would correct my mistakes in red pen and circle or write down key equations or concepts in red. Even for problems that I did correctly, I marked up the correct, key equations in red. At the end of Sept I went back over all of the problems I had worked and copied down the key (red pen) equations onto equation sheets. As I kept studying and using this equation sheet as my go-to and distanced myself from the CERM; I took the last practice NCEES exam and relied on this sheet almost exclusively. Along the way I would add to the equation sheet and tweak it if I found an error, or if something could be added/changed to better it—i.e. I took it for a “test drive”.
When all was said and done, I ended up with 36 pages of equation sheets. The sheets themselves weren’t just equations, they had diagrams showing each variable on the diagrams, etc. I didn’t want to get stuck with an equation with a bunch of variables that I couldn’t remember what they stood for when under pressure. I found it to be very helpful. All in all, there weren’t a ton of equations on the sheets. Some sheets had eight equations on them, others had only two; the majority of the sheets were taken up by diagrams and variable designations. All the equations were boiled down to their simplest form that I thought would be useful on the test (e.g. parallel pipe networks in terms of Q1 and Qtot since I came across that a lot in prepping).
The main reason that I made myself an equations sheet was that I didn’t want to be flipping through the CERM during the exam. Note that I found the CERM to be very helpful in developing my equation sheet, and I couldn't have done it without it. I just didn't want to rely on a huge reference book during the exam (I had so many flags that I couldn't find anything anymore because flags were on top of flags...). The fringe benefit of the equation sheet, aside from boiling everything down, was that I knew where 150+ equations were and could get to them within 10 seconds because I authored it.
When I took the exam, I used my equation sheet almost exclusively. I brought 8 books with me and only used the following a few number of times:
In Summary, my advice is:
Hope it helps and good luck.
Background is that I took the Oct, 2015 PE for Civil, WR/Env and passed on my first attempt.
Books that I picked up for practice problems:
To begin with, I picked up a bunch of second hand Lindeburg PE Prep books. I just wanted to get my hands on as much material as I could. I didn’t use most these books, as I later found them to be outdated (4th and 5th editions) in terms of problem-style as I got into it. The main book I used was Lindeburg’s Practice Problems for the Civil Engineering PE Exam (9th Ed, 2003.) It’s an enormous book and has tons of problems and I snagged it for $9.98. Yeah, it’s old, but it has good problems in it.
I borrowed SMS for Construction and WR and didn’t touch them. I borrowed the NCEES practice PE Exam for WR/Env (2011) and it found it to be invaluable. I ordered the NCEES practice PE Exam WE/Env (2014), which was fantastic. I picked up the NCEES practice PE Exam for Env (2011) only and found it to be too in-depth and esoteric for the Env problems I thought were likely on the test and I didn’t use it.
Practice regime was as follows:
I started studying in April. I knew it was early to begin, but I wanted to enjoy the process and not feel pressed for time if anything came up (some family stuff did come up, so I’m glad I did start early). I spend a couple hours a few nights a week studying to begin with and ramped it up at the end. I would re-work problems that I got wrong, so I could spend a study day (i.e. a couple hours) on a problem. If I was totally lost, then I would look at the solution.
I ended up working through:
- 154 problems from the Lindeburg Practice Problems, 9th Edition.
- 80 problems from the NCEES Sample WR/Env (2011)—worked through this twice—once in June so I could get an idea of the real gist of the problems and once again in Sept (was like I hadn’t taken it before as I forgot the problems).
- 80 problems from the NCEES Sample WR/Env (2014)—worked through this once in early Oct; set aside a Saturday and worked it straight through with four hours for each section (AM & PM) and with a one hour break in between sections—tried to make it “real”
I focused my studying based on the proportion of and types of questions provided on the NCEES website.
I took a classroom review course at my old grad school that my job paid for and I found it to be fairly useless to me, as I had already reviewed the concepts by then. It would have been a good review if I hadn’t been studying for a few months prior.
The key for me:
I found the key to studying was that I would correct my mistakes in red pen and circle or write down key equations or concepts in red. Even for problems that I did correctly, I marked up the correct, key equations in red. At the end of Sept I went back over all of the problems I had worked and copied down the key (red pen) equations onto equation sheets. As I kept studying and using this equation sheet as my go-to and distanced myself from the CERM; I took the last practice NCEES exam and relied on this sheet almost exclusively. Along the way I would add to the equation sheet and tweak it if I found an error, or if something could be added/changed to better it—i.e. I took it for a “test drive”.
When all was said and done, I ended up with 36 pages of equation sheets. The sheets themselves weren’t just equations, they had diagrams showing each variable on the diagrams, etc. I didn’t want to get stuck with an equation with a bunch of variables that I couldn’t remember what they stood for when under pressure. I found it to be very helpful. All in all, there weren’t a ton of equations on the sheets. Some sheets had eight equations on them, others had only two; the majority of the sheets were taken up by diagrams and variable designations. All the equations were boiled down to their simplest form that I thought would be useful on the test (e.g. parallel pipe networks in terms of Q1 and Qtot since I came across that a lot in prepping).
The main reason that I made myself an equations sheet was that I didn’t want to be flipping through the CERM during the exam. Note that I found the CERM to be very helpful in developing my equation sheet, and I couldn't have done it without it. I just didn't want to rely on a huge reference book during the exam (I had so many flags that I couldn't find anything anymore because flags were on top of flags...). The fringe benefit of the equation sheet, aside from boiling everything down, was that I knew where 150+ equations were and could get to them within 10 seconds because I authored it.
When I took the exam, I used my equation sheet almost exclusively. I brought 8 books with me and only used the following a few number of times:
- Steel Manual (ancient edition):
- Introduction to Environmental Engineering (Davis & Cornwell):
- CERM:
- University-supplied prep binder:
In Summary, my advice is:
- Start studying early, as: you’ll never know what will come up; so that you can enjoy the process; and so you’re not cramming;
- Download the NCEES breadth and depth specifications for the test so you know what to study for;
- Use the CERM, but write your own equation sheet based on key equations and concepts learned over your time spent working problems; do it so you know where everything is and how to use it.
Hope it helps and good luck.
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Then the afternoon came and kicked my butt!! I spent too much time on several of the first afternoon problems, which hurt me later on in the 4 hours. And it wasn't until pretty late in the session (probably the final 30 minutes or so) that I started feeling reasonably decent about it. Revisiting problems really seemed to pay off as there were numerous that I was completely stumped by at first that after a revisit or two I felt like I knocked out like nothing.
