Passing Rates For Oct-Only Exams

[LORMAR]

Still waiting on TN Controls results, but I don't like these numbers. I felt pretty good about the 2009 numbers, but now that these are out....

The only disciplines that didn't go down were Met and Mining.

Exam First-time Takers/Repeat Takers

Agricultural (October 2009) 80% 0%

Agricultural (October 2010) 68% 50%

Control Systems (October 2009) 81% 60%

Control Systems (October 2010) 69% 47%

Fire Protection (October 2009) 64% 43%

Fire Protection (October 2010) 52% 29%

Metallurgical and Materials (October 2009) 56% 33%

Metallurgical and Materials (October 2010) 64% 50%

Mining and Mineral Processing (October 2009) 73% 38%

Mining and Mineral Processing (October 2010) 79% 46%

Nuclear (October 2009) 79% 80%

Nuclear (October 2010) 57% 50%

Petroleum (October 2009) 83% 29%

Petroleum (October 2010) 80% 44%

 

[squrrelco3]

I'm wondering who skewed that is because they still don't have all of the results yet do they?...I mean some states still have to validate...just more confusion to add to the shole process...

 

[MrAnderson41]

Still waiting on TN Controls results, but I don't like these numbers. I felt pretty good about the 2009 numbers, but now that these are out....
The only disciplines that didn't go down were Met and Mining.

Exam First-time Takers/Repeat Takers

Agricultural (October 2009) 80% 0%

Agricultural (October 2010) 68% 50%

Control Systems (October 2009) 81% 60%

Control Systems (October 2010) 69% 47%

Fire Protection (October 2009) 64% 43%

Fire Protection (October 2010) 52% 29%

Metallurgical and Materials (October 2009) 56% 33%

Metallurgical and Materials (October 2010) 64% 50%

Mining and Mineral Processing (October 2009) 73% 38%

Mining and Mineral Processing (October 2010) 79% 46%

Nuclear (October 2009) 79% 80%

Nuclear (October 2010) 57% 50%

Petroleum (October 2009) 83% 29%

Petroleum (October 2010) 80% 44%

Where did you get this data. the only place that I know of that breaks it down like that is the PPI website but it doesn't appear to be updated yet. I'd like to see the number for the mechanical exams myself to compare the exam I just passed to previous administrations of the exam.

Edit: Nevermind. I see on the NCEES website that the passing rates listed are from the Oct 2010 exam unless otherwise noted. You obviously compared the NCEES page with the PPI page.

 

[MrAnderson41]

While what you say seems to be true for the Group II exams it isn't true for the Group I exams.

I took the passing rates for each of the Group I exams from 2002-2010 (according the PPI website) and averaged them and then compared them to the Oct 2010 results. All Group I exam passing rates are the same or better than the historical average with the exception of the Structural II exam.

Historical data was not available for the Group II exams so I compared the Oct 2010 results with the last administration available on the PPI website (Architectural and Naval were omitted because they weren't administered in Oct 2010). For the Group II exams, five had lower passing rates in Oct 2010 than the previous administration and three had better passing rates.

I then took the difference in passing rates between the Oct 2010 Group I exam and averaged them to come up with an average increase in passing rates for the Group I exams of roughly 3%. I did the same thing with the Group II exams and came up with an average decrease in passing rates for the Group II exams of roughly 4%.

 

[LORMAR]

Where did you get this data. the only place that I know of that breaks it down like that is the PPI website but it doesn't appear to be updated yet. I'd like to see the number for the mechanical exams myself to compare the exam I just passed to previous administrations of the exam.
Edit: Nevermind. I see on the NCEES website that the passing rates listed are from the Oct 2010 exam unless otherwise noted. You obviously compared the NCEES page with the PPI page.

I compared NCEES to NCEES. Apples to apples is always best. The OCT 2010 results were just added this week. Paste the link into Google and you can see the cached page (what it looked like last week).

 

[LORMAR]

While what you say seems to be true for the Group II exams it isn't true for the Group I exams.
I took the passing rates for each of the Group I exams from 2002-2010 (according the PPI website) and averaged them and then compared them to the Oct 2010 results. All Group I exam passing rates are the same or better than the historical average with the exception of the Structural II exam.

Historical data was not available for the Group II exams so I compared the Oct 2010 results with the last administration available on the PPI website (Architectural and Naval were omitted because they weren't administered in Oct 2010). For the Group II exams, five had lower passing rates in Oct 2010 than the previous administration and three had better passing rates.

I then took the difference in passing rates between the Oct 2010 Group I exam and averaged them to come up with an average increase in passing rates for the Group I exams of roughly 3%. I did the same thing with the Group II exams and came up with an average decrease in passing rates for the Group II exams of roughly 4%.

Why would you even do that? The annual apple crop production last year, compared to this year's orange crop, means nothing. Or am I missing something?

The one-year drop in the Nuclear pass rate from 79% to 57% is significant in itself. How that 28% drop (79-57/79) relates to Civil or Mechanical is beyond me.

 

[MrAnderson41]

Where did you get this data. the only place that I know of that breaks it down like that is the PPI website but it doesn't appear to be updated yet. I'd like to see the number for the mechanical exams myself to compare the exam I just passed to previous administrations of the exam.
Edit: Nevermind. I see on the NCEES website that the passing rates listed are from the Oct 2010 exam unless otherwise noted. You obviously compared the NCEES page with the PPI page.

I compared NCEES to NCEES. Apples to apples is always best. The OCT 2010 results were just added this week. Paste the link into Google and you can see the cached page (what it looked like last week).

The PPI numbers are from NCEES. I don't know where they would get them from if they aren't from NCEES.

While what you say seems to be true for the Group II exams it isn't true for the Group I exams.
I took the passing rates for each of the Group I exams from 2002-2010 (according the PPI website) and averaged them and then compared them to the Oct 2010 results. All Group I exam passing rates are the same or better than the historical average with the exception of the Structural II exam.

Historical data was not available for the Group II exams so I compared the Oct 2010 results with the last administration available on the PPI website (Architectural and Naval were omitted because they weren't administered in Oct 2010). For the Group II exams, five had lower passing rates in Oct 2010 than the previous administration and three had better passing rates.

I then took the difference in passing rates between the Oct 2010 Group I exam and averaged them to come up with an average increase in passing rates for the Group I exams of roughly 3%. I did the same thing with the Group II exams and came up with an average decrease in passing rates for the Group II exams of roughly 4%.

Why would you even do that? The annual apple crop production last year, compared to this year's orange crop, means nothing. Or am I missing something?

The one-year drop in the Nuclear pass rate from 79% to 57% is significant in itself. How that 28% drop (79-57/79) relates to Civil or Mechanical is beyond me.

The advantage of the PPI passing rates page is that they give historical data. Lets take the ME exam for example. I took the average of the historical passing rates for the ME exam dating back to 2002 (I think this number was around 69% if I recall correctly b/c I didn't save the spreadsheet). I then took that average and compared it to this years passing rate of 73%. This results in an increase of 4% for this exam administration. I did this for each discipline and then averaged the increases/decreases of all the disciplines together so I could better compare Group I exams to Group II exams. Even if you only look at April to October the pass rates I think you'll see that your statement of almost all passing rates are down is inaccurate. I think there is a pretty clear division between the Group I exams and Group II exams.

 

[LORMAR]

The advantage of the PPI passing rates page is that they give historical data. Lets take the ME exam for example. I took the average of the historical passing rates for the ME exam dating back to 2002 (I think this number was around 69% if I recall correctly b/c I didn't save the spreadsheet). I then took that average and compared it to this years passing rate of 73%. This results in an increase of 4% for this exam administration. I did this for each discipline and then averaged the increases/decreases of all the disciplines together so I could better compare Group I exams to Group II exams. Even if you only look at April to October the pass rates I think you'll see that your statement of almost all passing rates are down is inaccurate. I think there is a pretty clear division between the Group I exams and Group II exams.

I wasn't comparing Group I and II exams. I don't even know what Group I and II is. While I haven't spent a lot of time looking, I don't see those terms used on the NCEES site. I was ONLY looking at the non-mainstream exams offered only in October. Look at the title of the post: "OCT-only exams." Of those, all but 2 went down.

If one is to make any usable analysis which combines the averages across exam disciplines, one MUST weigh each average by the number of test takers for that exam. If 100 people take the nuclear exam, and the average is 50%, and 1000 people take the civil exam, and the average is 70%, the average of all testing is not 50+70/2. It is ((50)(100)+(1000)(70))/1100. Did your analysis do that?

 

[MrAnderson41]

The advantage of the PPI passing rates page is that they give historical data. Lets take the ME exam for example. I took the average of the historical passing rates for the ME exam dating back to 2002 (I think this number was around 69% if I recall correctly b/c I didn't save the spreadsheet). I then took that average and compared it to this years passing rate of 73%. This results in an increase of 4% for this exam administration. I did this for each discipline and then averaged the increases/decreases of all the disciplines together so I could better compare Group I exams to Group II exams. Even if you only look at April to October the pass rates I think you'll see that your statement of almost all passing rates are down is inaccurate. I think there is a pretty clear division between the Group I exams and Group II exams.

I wasn't comparing Group I and II exams. I don't even know what Group I and II is. While I haven't spent a lot of time looking, I don't see those terms used on the NCEES site. I was ONLY looking at the non-mainstream exams offered only in October. Look at the title of the post: "OCT-only exams." Of those, all but 2 went down.

If one is to make any usable analysis which combines the averages across exam disciplines, one MUST weigh each average by the number of test takers for that exam. If 100 people take the nuclear exam, and the average is 50%, and 1000 people take the civil exam, and the average is 70%, the average of all testing is not 50+70/2. It is ((50)(100)+(1000)(70))/1100. Did your analysis do that?

That data doesn't publicly exist. Listen, I'm not trying to get into a pissing match with you or prove that my PE-ness is bigger than your potential PE-ness or anything like that. I was simple pointing out that you generalization that "All most all passing rates went down" was incorrect. As you mentioned in the post above, you only looked at the non-mainstream exams offered only in October (those non-mainstream exams only offered once a year are Group II exams as PPI defines them BTW). If you had said "Of the non-mainstream exams offered only in October, all most all of the passing rates went down" your post wouldn't have been misleading.

Your post got me to wondering what the breakdown by discipline looked like and when I went to looked at it myself I thought that it was interesting that the Group I exam pass rates went up while Group II went down. I thought others might find this interesting and I also thought others that took the Group I exams and haven't been notified of results may see your thread and get the wrong impression and start freaking out (I know I would have if I was still waiting for results). Therefore, I thought I'd share what I found with the community here, just as you did, because I thought people might find it interesting or somewhat helpful.