I got notice that I passed the FE on August 19, 2016 and immediately went online and bought all of the study material I used for the PE, which includes CI, Lanza, PPI, Graffeo, and NCEES Practice Exam. I had decided that I would start "seriously" studying after the Thanksgiving holiday.
As the items I bought trickled in, I would casually flip through the pages to get a feel for the material that I would soon be studying in more detail. I then went online and reviewed the Complex Imaginary videos on YouTube and found my way to the www.electricalpereview.com website where I registered for Zach Stone's free online course. I then began to consolidate all of my college materials and my work references that I thought would contain the material covered in the Exam Specifications.
After the Thanksgiving Holiday, I started with electricalpereview.com and went through the entire course, building my study binder as I went along. I completed the course one full week before it went to a paid subscription format and considered paying to keep the subscription so that I could continue to review and study the material that I felt I could use more work on, but ultimately decided that it was time to start practicing taking the exams, so I declined to do the paid subscription and then started working through the practice exams I bought. I want to note here that I would interleave Zach's course work with practice exams because I felt that both were important.
Here is my personal review of the material I studied - your experience may differ from mine:
WWW.ELECTRICALPEREVIEW.COM REVIEW:
The course material covered was concise, orderly, and explained in a manner that was easy for me to follow. I feel like Zach summarized it best when he said, "the material covered on the PE Exam is a mile wide, but you'll only scratch an inch deep," and that was his approach to his examples and study material. The best quality, I felt, about Zach's course is that he was not only very responsive to questions submitted via email (a turn-around time of less than 24-hours for a reply was not unusual), but he was also very willing to look at examples where I found what I thought were errors in the way the question was set up. He was also available for consult when I worked through practice exam problems from other authors! In summary, I feel like Zach's course really went a long way towards my preparation. He and his course both were a very helpful resource, and I personally feel it was worth the time and effort.
COMPLEX IMAGINARY (SECOND EDITION) REVIEW:
I worked three of the four practice exams and felt that I was sufficiently prepared for the PE based on my performance with these tests...until I took the NCEES practice exam. Don't get me wrong - the CI tests were very helpful, if for no other reason than it exposed me to a lot of different types of material and potential exam questions, I just think that I went into this resource thinking that it was sufficient for passing the PE exam, but honestly, not one of these reviewed items are sufficient alone, in my opinion.
Prior to taking the NCEES practice exam, I felt that the level of difficulty of the questions in these practice exams were about what I could expect on the actual exam. I averaged anywhere from 70% to 85% on the test results and it took me about 3 hours to work through each session. After taking the NCEES practice exam, I realized that I needed to shift my study toward more knowledge of the subject matter, and so moved to studying Lanza's book.
CORY LANZA (THIRD EDITION) REVIEW:
The introduction is a definite "must read" for anyone thinking about taking the exam. I adopted the strategy he proposed in the "Taking The Exam" portion of the introduction and used it during all practice exams and the real exam and I honestly feel that the strategy he lays out absolutely works (it did for me, anyway). I felt that his practice exam questions were too "softball" for my taste - it was not unusual for me to sit back in my recliner and take one of his tests while drinking a glass of scotch and watching TV with the wife and still pass, so I was worried that if I spent too much time in this book's practice tests, I might miss out on better opportunities to test myself, so I moved on to Graffeo's book. Note: after taking the real test, I wish I had worked through more of Lanza's practice exams. There was a lot material on the real exam that I felt were more "knowledge based" than "calculation based," and I think Lanza's material would have been a good supplement to the other material I studied.
ALEXANDER GRAFFEO (JULY 2016 PRINTING) REVIEW:
Other than my hand-written study binder, this book is probably the most annotated, highlighted, flagged, and studied resource I used leading up to the exam. My mistake was I took his practice exam first. I scored a 72.5% (58/80) and it took me the entire 8 hours. When I finished the practice test, it occurred to me that the resource I needed to use to reduce the time of the test and improve my score was the material he provided in his book (for some strange reason, I used all of my other resources instead of the Graffeo book for problems I got stuck on). I then went back and studied the whole book cover-to-cover and I'm glad I did. It is a very well-written resource and I feel like I retained the information I studied from this book more than the other resources I studied.
NCEES PRACTICE EXAM:
It doesn't get any more real than this. I purposely delayed opening this or even peeking into it until about 1 month before the exam date. When I took this practice exam, I felt frustrated, rushed, disorganized, and thoroughly unprepared for the exam. I had convinced myself that I was not prepared and that I was getting ready to fail the exam in April. I scored about a 60% on the morning session, it took all four hours, and I decided to quit the test and did not work the afternoon session.
I got frustrated with myself and thought that I had wasted my time over the previous 4 months of preparation, but after a couple of days I looked over the wreckage objectively and realized that what I
really needed was a better way of organizing my reference material if I was going to pass.
I removed all tabs from my reference material, printed a copy of the exam specifications, highlighted each major section of the exam specifications with a different color highlighter, and then bought tabs of the same color to tab my material with, complete with a hand-written brief description of the tabbed location's content. I put the highlighted exam specs at the front of my study binder and when I was stuck on a subject, I could quickly identify a general location in my reference material where that information could be found. This greatly increased my "look-up" speed, as it required me to only examine 1/4th of the tabs (the color that matched the major section I was interested in). I also tabbed all helpful tables along the bottom of the my reference material, rather than along the edge with the rest of the tabs.
T-1 MONTH TO EXAM DATE:
I spent three weeks reviewing all of the material I felt I struggled with the most. The final week before the test, I cracked the NCEES exam book open again. While I knew what my score was on the first half, I was so utterly defeated when I took it the first time that I didn't even bother to review the material that I missed, which turned out to be a good thing. The reason why is I went into this second attempt with no prior knowledge of what I missed and why I missed it, so it was like taking the morning session for the first time (I didn't take the afternoon session on my first attempt, so it really was new to me). On this attempt, it took all eight hours to work both sessions and I scored a 75% on it, so I felt pretty good this time around.
EXAM DAY:
Morning session was not too bad for me. I felt like it was my stronger session. I had about 30 minutes left over when I had answered all of my questions, which gave me time to review the two or three I marked for review if I had time. I ultimately didn't make any changes to any questions during my review. I worked about 20 to 25 problems on my first pass through this session, if I recall correctly.
After lunch, I went into the afternoon session with a lot of confidence. I was upbeat and ready to go and get it finished. When they allowed us to start, I went through my first pass and had only answered about 10 questions. My first thought was, "Uh, oh...I'm in trouble."
My second pass was all code-related questions, which I'm pretty handy with, but that only netted two or three more questions answered, so I was left with 27 or so questions to work out in the time left (about 3.5 hours), which was about 7-8 minutes per question. By the time I got through my third-pass questions, I did a quick count and calculation and found that I only had about 3 minutes per question to work on my fourth pass questions. I began to panic and wondered if I would finish the exam guessing or if I could actually work this out. I read through my fourth-pass questions and worked the ones I knew I could do if I took my time and relaxed. Before I knew it, I hear them calling "15 minutes left." I had three more questions to answer, so I had worked myself back up to 5 minutes per question. I answered two of them best I could when they called "5 minutes left." I spent the next four minutes thumbing through every reference material I had at my disposal and never did find the answer, so I ultimately made a guess when they called "1 minute left." I guessed, put my pencil down and began packing up my material feeling like I had a 60/40 shot at passing.
Here is a list of the material I took with me to the exam. The
bolded material is material I actually used during the exam (neglecting the last question where I thumbed through all of my reference material in a desperate attempt to find the answer), but I did review everything I brought to some extent.
Italicized material is where I spent the lion's share of study and review.
- NFPA 780 LIGHTNING PROTECTION SYSTEMS, 2014 EDITION
- NESC, 2012
- NESC HANDBOOK, 2012
- NEC, 2014
- THE ELECTRICAL ENGINEER'S GUIDE TO PASSING THE POWER PE EXAM, ALEXANDER GRAFFEO
- COMPLEX IMAGINARY POWER PRACTICE EXAM
- COMPLEX IMAGINARY ELECTRICAL CODE DRILL BOOK
- SPIN-UP FOR THE ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING PE EXAM (POWER), CORY LANZA
- ELECTRICAL ENGINEER'S PORTABLE HANDBOOK, SECOND EDITION, ROBERT HICKEY
- POWER SYSTEM ANALYSIS, SECOND EDITION, CHARLES GROSS
- IEEE ORANGE BOOK
- IEEE GREEN BOOK
- IEEE GRAY BOOK
- CAMARA PRACTICE PROBLEMS
- CAMARA POWER REFERENCE MANUAL
- CAMARA QUICK REFERENCE
- CAMARA PRACTICE EXAMS
- STANDARD HANDBOOK FOR ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS, TWELFTH EDITION, DONALD G. FINK/H. WAYNE BEATY
- HANDBOOK OF ELECTRIC POWER CALCULATIONS, THIRD EDITION, H. WAYNE BEATY
- SCHAUM'S GUIDE 3000 SOLVED PROBLEMS IN ELECTRIC CIRCUITS, SYED A. NASAR
- HAND-WRITTEN STUDY BINDER FROM ELECTRICALPEREVIEW.COM
- UGLY'S ELECTRICAL REFERENCES
- NCEES PRACTICE EXAM
Congratulations!
