200-ish hours? Took and passed Civil PE Transportation on the first try. I started studying in late December in order to spread out the overall burden, since I already knew there were several weeks when I wouldn't be able to study at all.
I wanted to put everything I had into passing, so I went with EET AM / PM and took every listed reference to the test except Pedestrian Facilities (someone had 'walked off' with it ...). I thought EET prepared me very well for the test, but I also picked it because of the excellent reference binders that came with the course.
Unlike others on the board, I took exactly zero practice tests. All of my time was spent on reviewing concepts, navigating references, and working a few practice problems using reference tables and other resources. I spent a few hours tabbing things to quickly get my bearings in the actual test, but only marked significant chapters or indices rather than specific concepts. My situation is unique, since I have a lot of experience in research, reading, and looking up code trivia.
When you think about it, I believe something like 50-60% of the PE is conceptual questions rather than calculations?
I was already very confident in my ability to quickly solve problems, so I worked mostly on understanding the fastest route to solutions, practicing a few key or confusing concepts, and recognizing/categorizing problems in terms of what reference they were likely to use.
My first pass in each section was solely writing notes about what equation/concept/reference each problem was citing. A few I knew from memory, so I marked those (about five in the AM and five in the PM), then did the next easiest (i.e., simple lookups) another five in the AM and five in the PM, and then did the ones I needed to solve (10 AM and 10 PM), which got me up to roughly 40 correct overall. The remainder were more challenging code trivia with exotic locations and calculations with "traps" (another 10 in the AM and PM). This got me to about 60/80. The last 10 remaining to solve in the AM and PM I felt were more "reaching" or guessing questions, or those with so many steps that they were inefficient to attempt to solve with 100% certainty. I attempted to solve these with at least educated guesses or by eliminating between 1-2 answers.
After the test, I felt no worse than I had during the FE, which I also passed on the first try.
From what I've seen, focusing on understanding easy questions and getting as many of those right as possible is a key to substantially improving scores without unwarranted effort.
EET helped a lot in this case by teaching and reviewing the fundamentals of each section, with an emphasis on problems that were almost certain to appear on the test. Their classes certainly helped me be very efficient in my studying!
maybe October will be our time
