I'm enrolled in the PPI course and find it useful....
Great info and all good points. I definitely enjoy constructive feedback like this and it really helps me understand what the course takers like or dislike.
I agree that the problem solutions can often be cumbersome; if you have any specific examples I can see if we can get those changed for a future version of the text. One unfortunate behind-the-scenes part of teaching this course is I can only use PPI materials assigned in the course as homework and/or required reading. I'd love to copy some problems from a few other books for homework but for both copyright and PPI marketing reasons I can't use them. Still, as you said, the books are not useless and I personally found them to be quite helpful when combined with other texts during my SE exam studying.
PPI did a fairly poor job setting up the course as far as estimating the time required to go through the lectures and you're entirely right that we have a lot of material that should be trimmed down to leave time for examples. This is planned to be done before the next course but I'll see what I can do moving forward to cut down on this problem during this course. You're not the only one to have this complaint.
As for giving test taking strategy we had multiple people last year say this was one of the more valuable benefits of the PPI course so we'll probably leave it in. Some people will love it, others wont find it that useful. This is one of the problems with these courses is they're setup to provide help to everyone which unfortunately means it's perfectly tailored to no one. Oh well, it is what it is.
We had one person last year who pushed off the exam to have more time between the course and the exam, so you're not alone. Still, I personally think that having all the material fresh in your mind right before the exam is good and the course does that fairly well from what I can tell. Though, you're right that the course doesn't leave much room for self-study so I can see people having issues if they have a busy schedule at work or otherwise.
I honestly agree about the free repeat but think it's better than nothing. At risk of getting PPI annoyed at me, the free repeat of the course isn't going to teach you much more and I think they also make it somewhat tedious to get by having you upload all the homework problems and so on. That said, it's not excessively difficult to do the work for it and it is a good concept in theory. I know of many people here on engineerboards who were clearly getting burned out after their 3rd or so attempt at the SE. Being able to repeat the course just to watch the lectures would probably be a great feature. Though I entirely think that if you did need to repeat the exam and retake the PPI course that going though all the homework again and all the notes and so on would be a waste of time that could be better spent focusing on the areas that one did poorly on the SE exam.
Since I have you here, what do you think of my instruction during the lectures? Obviously one lecture isn't enough to tell but I highly value everyone's advice and I know that there's definitely room for improvement.