October 2021 Post Exam Wait Period - Welcome to the Suck

Professional Engineer & PE Exam Forum

Help Support Professional Engineer & PE Exam Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Thanks! Now I just have to get my continuing ed credits before my license expires in June of next year. Minnesota has all of the licenses expire at the end of June in even numbered years.

Edit: I think I actually do get an exception for the first licensing period so no worries there!
 
Last edited:
Thanks! Now I just have to get my continuing ed credits before my license expires in June of next year. Minnesota has all of the licenses expire at the end of June in even numbered years.
They don't exempt first time renewals from CEU requirements since you only have a partial term? My state does that and I've heard of other states doing the same thing.
 
Thanks! Now I just have to get my continuing ed credits before my license expires in June of next year. Minnesota has all of the licenses expire at the end of June in even numbered years.
It's odd that they make you get 24 hours in 6 months, as opposed to the regular 24 hours over 2 years. Do they exempt new licensees?
 
I actually think we do get an exception first licensing period. I'll figure out more as I go through the actual licensing process I suppose.
 
It's odd that they make you get 24 hours in 6 months, as opposed to the regular 24 hours over 2 years. Do they exempt new licensees?
Every State is different. The pdh regs are all-over-the-place

I can't remember which State it is, but there is one State where people who pass in October should avoid registering until January 1st, because if they registered immediately after passing then they'd have to pay the same fee again two weeks later when all licenses need to be renewed.
 
Well unfortunately I will be trying out the CBT… ugh… I was hoping I passed, but just getting out of quarantine from Covid I didn’t expect much…I’m still feeling the effects
Congratulations to everyone that passed
Don't worry! You will get it next time around, now you know how these tests are formatted 😀
 
This is complete BS. Everyone and their mom's mom knows NCEES is #1 on this list, at least between October-Dec.
Nah, we don't search, we know EXACTLY where to go.
Everyone has the URL bookmarked and memorized when waiting on results. Some might even set it as their homepage.
 
Well unfortunately I will be trying out the CBT… ugh… I was hoping I passed, but just getting out of quarantine from Covid I didn’t expect much…I’m still feeling the effects
Congratulations to everyone that passed
Go easy on yourself - this is a very strange time right now, and I don't think many of us are feeling 100% mentally. You'll get this :)
 
I actually think we do get an exception first licensing period. I'll figure out more as I go through the actual licensing process I suppose.
My state exempts from cont. ed. for the licensing period when PE exam is passed and not when license number is received.

I passed PE in November, applied in December and received a license number in March, which was the next licensing period from when PE was passed. I was sure I don’t need to do cont. ed. in the first period but found later from the board rep. that I have to complete all PDH’s because I passed PE in the previous term.
 
I'd like to offer my congratulations again to everyone who passed! This is a major accomplishment and something to be proud of, soon enough you'll get licensed by a State board and can add those two letters after your name.

On behalf of all of the vets here, we hope you stick around! If you found the WttS or any of the other threads helpful then pay if forward and help the next class of engineers. As the community has fully switched from bi-annual P&P to continuous CBT exams there will always be someone else that needs helps.

And beyond the technical threads we have active social threads and game (especially mafia) in the shoot the breeze forum.
 
Over the years, I've been asked to write a follow up to the stages of wait. I said I would but obviously that never happened. There are many reasons why.

Foremost, I'm just reluctant to finally just sit down to write a carefully written essay. I do it for work and I try not to things that feel like work for my hobbies.

It's really two essays. One for people who failed and one for people who passed. Considerable effort and tact is required for the former.

The audience for such an essays are limited. Most people just want to get their results and move on with their life. Which is fine. The timing of the post is difficult. When is the right time make a post about post-results life? Right before the drop, when people are too nervous to read it? After the initial release when people are too jubilant, depressed, or angry to read it - or distracted by their ongoing wait? A week days later, when only the hooked are here, or the depressed looking answers? IDK?

The answer is probably the last option. And I should have done it 3 years ago and recycled it or called back to it. But I didn't do that, and it's too late to ever impact a P&P exam person. But as I type this, I realized it may still work for the CBT exam takers. And I will endeavor to write two separate threads to cover those topics for CBT takers before year end.

On a related note, one of my greatest regrets with the WttS is that I never wrote a substantive post-fail message. It's a sensitive topic and I lack the E.Q. to do it justice. I always deferred to some of the other vets who had messages of their own that they liked to post.
 
History Time!

In these next few posts I'm going to discuss the genesis of the WttS, and the broad strokes of the progression of State releases, maps, and the EB culture surrounding the release over time.



I took the PE exam for the first time in October 2013. Things were rough the first couple weeks after the exam but I managed to stop thinking about it during the second half of November. Then one night in early December I had a dream that I failed the exam. I'm a lucid dreamer, and I knew it was false but it still shock me. I was alone on a business trip in a hotel in Brussels. And I couldn't get back to sleep that night. I checked PCS and NCEES websites for the first of hundreds times that month. Nothing.

I returned Stateside a few days later. I checked in with a work colleague who also took the nuclear PE exam that session. I could see it in his face as soon as I walked into his office that he failed. He told me the results came out a few days prior. It was the beginning of a long December.

Maryland was the last State to release that year. The initial release happened on day 40, I had to wait until day 54. Remember how you felt from the moment I said that the the release was imminent through actually getting your results? The catatonic nerves and dread. The inability to concentrate or do anything productive. Most of you had to wait a few hours. I had that feeling for two weeks! New Jersey only had to put up with it for a week this cycle. I had to deal with that for two f#$%ing weeks! And no it doesn't get easier with time.

A week into that wait the pass rates were released. At the time they didn't report the number of takers for a given exam; only the first time and repeat taker pass rates. A quirk of the nuclear PE exam is that there are so few test takers and one can basically break those percentages down into raw numbers. i.e. 44% is obviously 4/9. And during those two weeks I would hear of other individual nuclear PE takers passing and failing. While I was waiting I was seeing the chances of my passing go up and down with the amount of outstanding results. Usually the passing chance went down.

Anyway back in 2005 I would see ads on TV for the movie Jarhead. The ads would finish with the tagline "Welcome to the Suck". I thought it was funny and it resonated with me. Eight years later I would describe the PE wait as "the suck". I had no idea that the "the Suck" was the what some Marines call the Marine Corp. Kind obvious in retrospect. In fact, I've worked extensively with every uniformed service except for the Marines. It wouldn't be until early 2019 that I learned it was a USMC thing. Oops sorry.

I found EB the morning my results finally released. At the time only members could read the website. I guess bandwidth was so high at the time that it was an effort to reduce costs? I was trying to read threads via google cached pages and deleting cookies. I read on here that Maryland had finally released, and a few seconds later I got the email.

I failed.

In the coming days the ban on non-members viewing pages went away. I was able to get a better idea of what happened during that time. I saw a bunch of people ignorant of the process, lots of people trying to figure stuff out, lots of theory, lots of trolling and no one actually trying to collect or compile notes. I knew that I was going to have to go through this process a year later and I wanted to be better prepared. I came back briefly the next May to observe. It wasn't a serious effort but I was trying to learn to make things easier the next fall.

It wasn't much easier. Back then people would start new threads to ask a questions, or rant, or whatever about the exam and the wait. It was difficult for the PE candidates to track of what was going on. It was difficult for the well meaning vets to triage. It was great for the trolling though. Back then people would create a State release thread in the relevant results subforum when they got their results. People would refresh the subforum page, and assume that results came out if they saw a State had released. That's why those fake results threads got such a rise out of people.

I passed in October 2014. It was one of the longer waits on record. It was painful and it sucked. And I thought that there had to be a better way. I resolved to come back in April and try to help out the next class.

One of the things I noticed in those three sessions was that it was always the same the questions or arguments being posed. The vets would bounce between the threads and try to answer the same questions that they answered six months prior... or sometimes they would just troll. Inevitably one or two of those threads would take off and become the default "waiting thread" for that administration. You can think of those threads as proto-WttS. In October 2014 there were four such threads!

And It was like that every six months.

I had the idea of putting together everything in one thread in early 2015 but I never got around to it. 2015 and 2016 were the busiest years of my career. Instead I would just keep up the tradition of bouncing between threads and trying to help when and where I could.
 
Last edited:
History Time!

In these next few posts I'm going to discuss the genesis of the WttS, and the broad strokes of the progression of State releases, maps, and the EB culture surrounding the release over time.



I took the PE exam for the first time in October 2013. Things were rough the first couple weeks after the exam but I managed to stop thinking about it during the second half of November. Then one night in early December I had a dream that I failed the exam. I'm a lucid dreamer, and I knew it was false but it still shock me. I was alone on a business trip in a hotel in Brussels. And I couldn't get back to sleep that night. I checked PCS and NCEES websites for the first of hundreds times that month. Nothing.

I returned Stateside a few days later. I checked in with a work colleague who also took the nuclear PE exam that session. I could see it in his face as soon as I walked into his office that he failed. He told me the results came out a few days prior. It was the beginning of a long December.

Maryland was the last State to release that year. The initial release happened on day 40, I had to wait until day 54. Remember how you felt from the moment I said that the the release was imminent through actually getting your results? The catatonic nerves and dread. The inability to concentrate or do anything productive. Most of you had to wait a few hours. I had that feeling for two weeks! New Jersey only had to put up with it for a week this cycle. I had to deal with that for two f#$%ing weeks! And no it doesn't get easier with time.

A week into that wait the pass rates were released. At the time they didn't report the number of takers for a given exam; only the first time and repeat taker pass rates. A quirk of the nuclear PE exam is that there are so few test takers and one can basically break those percentages down into raw numbers. i.e. 44% is obviously 4/9. And during those two weeks I would hear of other individual nuclear PE takers passing and failing. While I was waiting I was seeing the chances of my passing go up and down with the amount of outstanding results. Usually the passing chance went down.

Anyway back in 2005 I would see ads on TV for the movie Jarhead. The ads would finish with the tagline "Welcome to the Suck". I thought it was funny and it resonated with me. Eight years later I would describe the PE wait as "the suck". I had no idea that the "the Suck" was the what some Marines call the Marine Corp. Kind obvious in retrospect. In fact, I've worked extensively with every uniformed service except for the Marines. It wouldn't be until early 2019 that I learned it was a USMC thing. Oops sorry.

I found EB the morning my results finally released. At the time only members could read the website. I guess bandwidth was so high at the time that it was an effort to reduce costs? I was trying to read threads via google cached pages and deleting cookies. I read on here that Maryland had finally released, and a few seconds later I got the email.

I failed.

In the coming days the ban on non-members viewing pages went away. I was able to get a better idea of what happened during that time. I saw a bunch of people ignorant of the process, lots of people trying to figure stuff out, lots of theory, lots of trolling and no one actually trying to collect or compile notes. I knew that I was going to have to go through this process a year later and I wanted to be better prepared. I came back briefly the next May to observe. It wasn't a serious effort but I was trying to learn to make things easier the next fall.

It wasn't much easier. Back then people would start new threads to ask a questions, or rant, or whatever about the exam and the wait. It was difficult for the PE candidates to track of what was going on. It was difficult for the well meaning vets to triage. It was great for the trolling though. Back then people would create a State release thread in the relevant results subforum when they got their results. People would refresh the subforum page, and assume that results came out if they saw a State had released. That's why those fake results threads got such a rise out of people.

I passed in October 2014. It was one of the longer waits on record. It was painful and it sucked. And I thought that there had to be a better way. I resolved to come back in April and try to help out the next class.

One of the things I noticed in those three sessions was that it was always the same the questions or arguments being posed. The vets would bounce between the threads and try to answer the same questions that they answered six months prior... or sometimes they would just troll. Inevitably one or two of those threads would take off and become the default "waiting thread" for that administration. You can think of those threads as proto-WttS. In October 2014 there were four such threads!

And It was like that every six months.

I had the idea of putting together everything in one thread in early 2015 but I never got around to it. 2015 and 2016 were the busiest years of my career. Instead I would just keep up the tradition of bouncing between threads and trying to help when and where I could.
Excellent post @RBHeadge PE .
Can I suggest that these post be a separate thread?

This will get forever lost in the specific Oct21 WttS. It should be preserved for posterity.
 
Last edited:
@jean15paul_PE
I like the idea! I'll meet you halfway.

I want to end this thread with a poetic style and I need some of those history posts for it to "work".

When I'm done here I'll copy it into a new thread with some narrative edits to let it stand on it's own. Maybe something like "An oral history of the P&P PE exam experience circa 2000s-2021". I'll start it with a matter-of-fact narrative. Then open it open for peoples to discuss their own experiences and perspective's. Would people be interested in that?

@ Everyone
I'll probably have this wrapped up by Thursday evening.
Next post will be somewhat short, it'll cover the maps, and the different release "eras".
WttS April 2018- April 2019
Oct 2019 post-mortem
WttS 2020-2021
finale

Does anyone else have any other questions or suggested topics?
 
Question: How does Texas deal with the computer based tests? Is the 7-10 wait period that NCEES tells you longer because Texas would still have to do their own scaled score kinda thing? Or do they not do that since NCEES already does a scaled score for CBT tests?

Seems like it would be a nightmare for them doing it constantly since you can take the tests year-round now.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top