The ones who passed tell us how you did.

[AlexandroAldama]

Reposting from the CE-WRE thread.  This was my first time taking it, studied a little over a month, used three practice exams, the CRM, and some old text books I've kept around.  I was fairly well prepared for the AM, I was NOT prepared for the PM.  Five years out of college.

I passed so I don't know what my score was, but here is what I thought I scored.

AM 30 answered confidently, estimated 28 correct.  5 50/50 guessed, estimated 2 correct.  5 completely guessed, estimated 1 correct.

PM 17 answered confidently, estimated 16 correct. 10 answered less confidently, estimated 7 correct.  13 answered with low confidence or guessed, estimated 4 correct.

I felt that was a "Safe" estimate which put me at 58, it could have been as high as the low 60s though.  Cut score was higher than 54 from what we can tell.

TL;DR

PM: 31

AM: 27

Thank You very very much, it helps the rest have confidence and tackle better this anxiety.

Congratulations as well you deserve it.

 

[3va87]

I recommend EET for Civils. It was super easy to follow and the notes were really good. I passed on my second time, and they were the key to success. I think overall the key is knowing your notes and being organized. 

Remember you don't need to know everything, just where you can find it. The other great tip I had was aim for 80% in the morning and 60% in the afternoon,as you will be more tired and 'slower'.

I didn't do a lot of practice problems either but I focused on quality material.

 

[tiffintexas]

Passed Civil - WRE. I did not feel confident in the morning. I only all out guessed on about 5 of them, but felt unsure on about 10 of them, and felt confident in the rest.

I wrecked the afternoon. I felt confident on 36-37 of them. Guessed on 3.

I didn’t take a review course, but I have a masters in environmental engineering and do hydraulics and hydrology for my work, so that definitely helped.

Morning: 25

Afternoon: 37 

 

[ATDoel]

Passed Civil - WRE. I did not feel confident in the morning. I only all out guessed on about 5 of them, but felt unsure on about 10 of them, and felt confident in the rest.

I wrecked the afternoon. I felt confident on 36-37 of them. Guessed on 3.

I didn’t take a review course, but I have a masters in environmental engineering and do hydraulics and hydrology for my work, so that definitely helped.

Morning: 25

Afternoon: 37 

if you knew hydraulics, I felt that was a big win for this AM section.  That's my weak point and hurt me the most, a lot of the hydraulics questions on the exam were not similar at all to the ones on the practice exams I took

 

[sgdewitte]

Passed Civil Transportation. Felt like I killed the AM, knew 36 or 37 and did educated guesses on the others.

PM felt tough. Hardly any gimmes. Felt good about ~25, 50/50 on 10, and outright guess on 5.

 

[mlavigne]

Passed HVAC - i thought i lived up to being having one of the highest statistical pass rates.  i got a 63/80 of the NCEES practice exam after 15 hours of studying- that was slightly harder than the real thing- id guess i got 70+ on the real one.  I only wasn't sure on 3-4 in each section and most of those were pure lookup type questions which i had time to find.  I finished 25 minutes early in the morning and 45 minutes in the afternoon.  The MERM study guide had me nervous (those questions are crazy hard), but 20 hours total of studying and a full 8 hr practice test were enough for NCEES i guess.

 

[bphyduk]

Passed Machine Design & Materials; this was my second attempt. I felt very confident following the morning session (say, 35/40), but struggled in the afternoon. I'd say I was only confident in 20-25 of the afternoon problems, and was left with 5 problems to guess on before time expired. I studied using School of PE on-demand, NCEES practice exam, School of PE workshop problems, and PPI practice exam. 

 

[OSU_Gamerr]

Passed Civil: Structural in Oregon (1st attempt). I'm 3 years removed from college, so it helped that the general civil topics weren't too rusty...it all came back pretty quickly. Like many of you I was told to shoot for 35 on the morning and 20 on the afternoon. Did not exactly play out that way. I was very confident on 30 in the morning, and then the other 10 were just...tricky...I felt fairly certain about my answers, but not totally confident. The afternoon went smoother than I expected, there were a lot of gimmes. I felt confident on about 30 in the afternoon, 5 I was unsure of, and then 5 were total guesses (screw masonry). 

I self prepared in addition to advice from PE's I work under. Studied for 3 months, 10 hours a week on average. I tried to do 2 hours in the evening on weekdays, and tried to keep my weekends free to relieve some stress and give my mind a break (this held true for the first 2 months, the last month I ended up taking practice exams Sat/Sun).

I think I over-studied the morning session material. Looking back on it, I was preparing for the morning topics like I had to take the depth exam for each topic. I was rigorously going through the CERM studying for water/geo/soils/ SoM, and then drilling the Lindeburg practice problems. And the morning questions are not like that at all. I started to realize that with a month to go when I started taking practice exams, especially the NCEES practice exams, and getting a feel for the problems.

The afternoon material was easier for me to study. I'm a structural designer with work consisting of steel design, existing concrete structure analysis, and aluminum design (unrelated to the PE). I took timber design during college, which really helped prepare me for the wood questions. Totally lost on masonry....never took a class on it in college....tried my best to learn the topic and affiliated codes.....but I knew I didn't stand much of a chance lol. So I didn't have to review these topics a whole lot, I just drilled the depth practice exams (probably ended taking 4-5 depth practice exams; ~200 problems). And similar to the morning session, most of the actual problems were much easier than the practice problems on the actual test.

Main Study Materials:

Lindeburg: CERM, Practice Problems, Practice Exams

NCEES: PE Civil Engineer Structural Practice Exam, FE Reference Handbook

Six Minute Solutions: Transportation, Geotech, Structural

Think my biggest take away is review class or something (many examples have been posted) for the morning would have been really helpful. Especially at the start of the journey, so you know what to study right away.

Congrats to everyone that passed! To those that didn't: keep fighting! Keep believing in your work ethic, your preparation, and most importantly: yourself. I wish you all the best of luck.

TL;DR

AM: 30

PM: 30

 

[Dr_J]

Passed Civil Transportation. Felt like I killed the AM, knew 36 or 37 and did educated guesses on the others.

PM felt tough. Hardly any gimmes. Felt good about ~25, 50/50 on 10, and outright guess on 5.

Yes the PM was tougher than I expected. After the AM I felt like, ok I think AM wasn't that bad and now I am gonna kill the PM. Well when I saw the PM I was like - well it seems it wont be that easy in the end. But I passed.

 

[EI_EI_OH]

Passed Civil:WRE

Morning Session: I felt really good about the morning. I believe I only guessed on 3-5 problems, and I was able to come up with answers for all but 1 problem.

Afternoon Session: I thought this was a lot tougher than the three practice exams I took. Mainly because of the Environmental/Water Treatment Questions. I highly recommend the method of going through and answering the easiest problems first, the ones you think you can tackle with a little skimming of the reference material next, and then finally going after the problems that give you a full panic attack. I had to straight guess on 8-10 problems when time was about to run out. This caused me to think I might have failed, because in the three practice exams I was only guessing on about 5 problems per afternoon session.

I studied about 50-60 hours total. No prep classes. Just my reference materials and practice exams/problems.

Morning: ~35

Afternoon: 23-30

 

[NYCBruin]

Cali structure, 1st legit try, pass.

Morning session was pretty easy, had time to do it twice just to make sure, afternoon was kinda hard for me and ended up educated-guessing on about 8.

Studied for 3 weeks including the test week,  used SOP for reference, did not take course.

The SOP materials I used covered somewhat deeper than than actual test in the morning but not deep enough for the afternoon.

Congrats to everyone who passed and best of luck to everyone who need to do this again, yall got this!

 

[goldpanner]

Passed Civil Transportation

Morning: I felt confident on the majority of questions, approximately 6 questions I wasnt sure of (educated guesses, process of elimination).
Afternoon: Rough! Optimistically, felt confident on ~25. WAG on 5 questions.

I used testmasters course, as I am 15 years removed from graduating, and pursued other interests up until 5 years ago when I got back into the Engineering field.
I had all the reference books (HCM, HSM, Green Book, etc) as well as the CERM....I dont think I opened any of them, as I used the Testmaster spiral-bound books to find everything I needed. They were very well laid out, and I had tabbed the heck outta them as well.

My advise is time management (both in studying AND test taking), and become familiar with your resources (in my case, the testmasters notebooks).

Best of luck to future test takers, and believe in yourself!

 

[JefeAK]

MDM, passed

Morning session i feel i crushed it, at lunch I felt awesome feeling like 100% I'm going to pass this exam. I'd guess I got somewhere in the 80-90%

Afternoon session, still felt good after about 10 problems, then the going got tough. I did a 1st pass answering questions I felt like I knew how to do right away. Probably answered about 16 of those (ouch), so call that 14 right. Went through and answered the the look up type problems, figure there were about 10 max of those, so call that another 6 or 7 right. that leaves 14 problems, I would say 10 problems I was not not comfortable with, so give me 3 there. Add em up and Im guessing maybe I got a 23/40 on the afternoon.

So go 85% morning + 23 afternoon = say 57

1st time I took it I just went MERM.

2nd time, I used Merm, Shigley, and machinery handbook. I found the handbook to be  necessary for at least 5 of the look up problems. 

I took 3 practice exams

eng pro- was a little easy but a good warm up

Lindenburg- was super difficult, destroyed my confidence. This was wayyyy harder than the NCEES exam and practice exam. if you get above a 60% on this you should feel real good going into the exam. I got about a 50% on this one and I took it two weeks before the exam.

NCEES- probably the best exam as to what the actual was, but there were definitely a few topics that were on the exam not in the practice. Also, they post corrections to the practice exam on their site, thought this would be useful as i wasted a day or two trying to figure out what I did wrong on problems I actually got right.

Hope this helps, good luck.

 

[danielle.passaglia]

Passed Mechanical HVAC. Morning felt a lot easier to me than the afternoon. The morning session, I was super confident on 32 of the questions. The other 8, I got one of the answers in the multiple choice but wasn't 100% sure they were correct. I estimated I got about half of those correct. The afternoon portion was harder for me. There were 12 that I was not 100% sure about, and out of those, there were 2 that were complete guesses.

 

[jander88]

ME - TFS - First Time Taker - Pass

Finished both sessions feeling wishy-washy on ~5 questions per session. Felt like there were only two questions where I had no idea. Other than that I felt really good about all of my solution paths and left the exam with a distinct feeling that I had done well enough!

Cheers!

 

[ads0221]

Civil/Structural 2nd time Pass

Morning - I felt confident I got about 34. There were 3-4 that was 50/50 on and 2-3 that I just guessed.

Afternoon - I felt confident I got about 24. There were about 6-7 where I narrowed it down to 50/50 and about 7-8 where I just flat up guessed.

The two keys for me passing this time vs last fall was 1) knowing the breadth portion backwards and forwards to where I left myself some wiggle room in the afternoon. 2) solving the simple conceptual questions in the afternoon first and working problems easiest to hardest.

 

[Eggyolk]

Mechanical TFS in Texas

I thought it went well in the morning I was able to calculate something for all the questions but I was only confident in 36 out of 40

For the afternoon, I was not able to calculate any of the options for 2 and was not confident in another 4. so 34 out of 40.

The biggest thing I did was just actually doing multiple practice exams and not assume you got it because you know the formulas.

I guess my estimate was right as I got 88 (70 out of 80)

 

[bcn989]

Civil/Structural - 1st time pass for the PE exam.  I had previously taken and passed SE vertical and failed SE lateral.

I did school of PE on demand class which I found to be very helpful and would recommend for breadth and depth.

I did a lot of problems from any practice problem book I could get my hands on.  

If I had to guess I was somewhere around 25/40 in the morning and 35/40 in the afternoon.

 

[Nare]

Passed Civil WRE first time -- onwards to the next 2 exams....

Guessed on 1 in morning section, guessed on 8 in afternoon section; thus I was expecting to get around 60-62/80, accounting for bad guessing and tricks questions. My way of estimating how much I got right was multiplying by 2 the amount I guessed on. If you think you guessed on 15 or more problems, I think that's a sign of being on the border of pass/fail.

Took no classes. Only bought/did practice exams and skimmed over the CERM/tabbed it. ~50-60 hrs of study, ~8-10 hrs of researching/compiling materials for study. It helps to be straight out of college for test taking. Tbh surprised I passed -- took no civil classes in undergrad or grad school covering anything in breadth..however breadth was far easier than the WRE depth which surprised me. I thought I'd ace WRE; was exact opposite -- tough WRE, you really need to know your stuff.

 

[ChooChooEngineer_PE]

Passed Mechanical MDM, 1st try

Morning section definitely felt that I got 35 solidly and remaining 5 were likely right but was just less confident. Did not have any question where my calculations didn't yield an answer in the choices (yes, I know many answer choices are deliberately created with one minor error in calculations). Walked out with time to spare.

Afternoon section was definitely more difficult. I think i was confident on 20-25. Remaining questions again, my calculations always yielded an answer from the choices. Only had one problem where I was forced to plug answers in and guess and check. One thing that really hit me hard was a post lunch slump, really had to struggle for a bit to keep my eyes open.

So probably 60/80

I took the PPI class for this exam and my feelings on it are mixed. My employer paid for it so ROI is technically infinity. However PPI's machine design class covered topics that weren't even in the exam specification. I think most of the class was a great way to recall my knowledge from my college classes a decade ago, and a class structure helped me study and pace myself. Definitely glad I came across this board and looked into additional resource material. Also doing a practice exam in a simulated timed condition really helped me get confident that I could pace myself and get to all my reference material in time.

One thing that helped me was on a last minute call I brought my materials book and it helped out on some questions that I'd be guessing otherwise.

Exam References:

MERM

Bound copy of the NCEES PE manual (with a lot of corrections written in)

NCEES practice exam

PPI 6 minute problems

PPI practice exam

Binder with personal notes

Shingley's Machine Design

Material's book

Machinery's Handbook

Mark's Standard Handbook for Engineers

Hope this helps out any future test takes, good luck all!