I am preparing to sit for the Civil P.E. exam in Florida this upcoming October. I more than likely will sit for the Transportation Depth portion. I am beginning to study for the exam, but feel quite overwhelmed at the amount of material. I am requesting any words of wisdom you may have in how I can effectively study for this exam. Should I go through the Reference Manual in its entirety and then proceed to work as many problems as I can? What study philosophies have worked for you? Also, what is your opinion on study review courses? I am contemplating taking the review course offered by FES or Testmasters, but am not sure if the cost is justified. Any advice you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Studying for Civil P.E. in October - NEED HELP
- Thread starter Shadetree
- Start date
Help Support Professional Engineer & PE Exam Forum:
csb
Well-known member
Gather references based on what is listed by NCEES. You will not need all of them, but some of them are must haves for the Transportation Depth. Get your hands on a Green Book, MUTCD, and Roadway Design Guide for sure. A CERM is also necessary.
I highly suggest working the Six Minute Solutions. This will prepare you for a wide variety of problems. Start working problems from there and from the CERM and any other practice problems you can find. This will start to familiarize you with the references. I think this would be better than reading through them, because it puts the information in context to see it with a problem.
Study review courses are wonderful things. I didn't attend one, but I did have a CD-ROM course I worked through. If you feel you are very rusty on subjects or that you may struggle with independent study I believe it is worth the cost.
Good luck!
I highly suggest working the Six Minute Solutions. This will prepare you for a wide variety of problems. Start working problems from there and from the CERM and any other practice problems you can find. This will start to familiarize you with the references. I think this would be better than reading through them, because it puts the information in context to see it with a problem.
Study review courses are wonderful things. I didn't attend one, but I did have a CD-ROM course I worked through. If you feel you are very rusty on subjects or that you may struggle with independent study I believe it is worth the cost.
Good luck!
Another option that I used was online questions that were made by the same people that make the CERM. It is called the PPI exam cafe. I took the water/enviro test and it prepared me quite well. The online questions though have all of the afternoon depths. The questions seemed slightly harder than what was actually on the test which worked out great for preparing me.
The cost was around $50 for two months worth.
get ALL of the reference material and know ALL of them intimately. also get Chen's civil engineering manual, that helped me on a bunch of questions. and the CERM is a must have. the most important thing is dont memorize how to do practice problems, figure out how they're solved and why they're solved that way, and where in your references you need to go to solve that particular type of problem. that's much more important than memorizing how to do practice problems, because you're never going to see that exact problem on the test. remember, they're testing you to see if you're a competent engineer, not whether you memorized how to do practice problems.
