To all those who passed, congratulations. To all those who didn't, keep with it.
Personally, I am fortunate to be employed in a position where I can practice my little corner of engineering without having to maintain a PE license. I took the exam in October because I felt I owed it to myself to set my own bar a little higher and see if I could jump over it. I was eagerly awaiting my results (I live in PA which is notoriously slow in getting results back...fortunately NCEES posted my passed status a few days later, though I'm still awaiting the official results from my state board) and was frankly pretty disappointed by some of the postings I was seeing on this forum. I was also encouraged by some others, too.
First, the encouraging posts; these were usually some variation of "I didn't pass this time -- I was unprepared for the type of questions they asked" or "I did not bring the correct / enough reference materials". This is completely understandable -- the NCEES exam guide is pretty nebulous on the types and scope of questions that will be asked; it only outlines the categories of questions and roughly what percentage of the exam will cover each of those categories. The people who made posts like this are probably going to pass the next round, and will make good engineers some day.
Then, there were the posts that made me shake my head. I work in an educational institution where I see the same gamut of prospective engineers: those who try hard, and those who, well, don't; so seeing these posts wasn't a whole lot of new stuff for me. To the people who post things like, "the exam tried to trick you", "the exam is too hard", or "there were questions that weren't in my discipline", and then go on to try to blame the board and/or NCEES for making it too hard to become a PE, I can unequivocally say this: you need to take a deep, long look within and ask yourself why you are trying to become a PE. If you needed emergency surgery, I'm sure you wouldn't be eager to hop on the operating table if the surgeon had just told you, "when I took my medical board exam, the questions were too hard, so I complained and they lowered their requirements, and I finally passed after the sixth time". Engineering is basically the same thing -- the certification is to ensure the protection of life and property, since, in many fields, if something engineered (that requires a PE signoff) fails, there is a high likelihood that someone will die. In historic times, when the engineers of the Roman army would build a bridge, they were required to stand beneath it while the first legion crossed overhead. If you cannot confidently say you are willing to stand under a bridge you designed while a 50-ton crane drives over top of it, you probably need some more intern time. If you're yelling at the sky saying NCEES "tricks" you by providing too much information to sufficiently answer a question, then frankly, you have no business being an engineer -- real-world problems always come with data points that aren't needed to solve them. It is the job of a good engineer to sift through the available information and whittle it down to what is needed and what is just supporting data for someone else. If you are unable to recognize what information is needed and what isn't, that's fine -- grab a reference book.....if you spend hours searching the internet for samples of the exact problem you're trying to solve, and then just substitute your numbers into the equations without really understanding why they're needed, then you should probably find a different field to work in. If you forgot to include a factor-of-safety in your final number, that's fine, if you immediately recognize that when reviewing the answer sheet, and then learn your lesson and check factors-of-safety after every subsequent problem.....if you instead blame the exam writers for including in the possible answers a value which didn't factor in FOS, that's not them trying to trick you -- that's them weeding out a careless engineer. Let's face it, you wouldn't want to get into a plane whose wing spars were designed by an engineer who consistently forgets to include FOS values.
And finally, to those who say that computers have largely made pencil-and-paper engineering obsolete, you are fooling yourself -- computers are what's known as "garbage in - garbage out", meaning that if you design some beam to handle some load, but incorrectly set up the problem or screw up the constraints, it will give you an answer which makes no sense from an engineering standpoint, but according to the computer, is 100% valid. The difference is having the intuition to be able to recognize when the computer is feeding you garbage, and when it is giving you an answer that is within the bounds of what you'd expect. "Why yeah, this balsa-wood bridge will easily be able to support the mass of a full-sized vehicle".....is that really the case, or did you input a wrong number somewhere into the program? It is still good to do back-of-the-envelope calculations for the simpler aspects of a problem, so you have some baseline number to compare against when the computer spits some values out at you. I had an engineering student once tell me in response to a fatigue question I asked, "yes, we did fatigue analysis in the FEA -- it says it's good for over 10 million cycles, so obviously there's no problem there." Except the bracket in question was an IC engine mount, and if you use an average of 2000 rpm for the engine speed, that lifetime means it would be expected to fail after 83 hours. That's where the intuition comes into play.
One last note on preparation methods/materials: I can quite frankly say that, after purchasing the PPI practice exam, six-minute solutions, and practice problems books, I was fully expecting to fail. In fact, when I took the PPI practice exam in an exam-like environment, I think I was only able to answer ~30% of the questions in the allotted time, and only got like 50% of those correct. That was, to say the least, disheartening. Then I was fortunate to come across a post somewhere that someone who had passed the NCEES exam saying that the PPI practice exams are not only non-representative, but you also likely need an advanced degree to complete them in the expected 6 minute timeframe for each question. There were also a lot of frustrating nuances with the PPI exam, such as questions not providing Young's Modulus for the material presented (and even more bizarre -- different answers use different values for the same material). I studied a bit more, prepared a spreadsheet of most-used equations to save me some time thumbing through reference materials, and then took the NCEES practice exam and not only finished early, but got ~72%. Many of the questions I missed were "stupid mistakes" of me either not reading the question completely enough or not thinking completely through the problem....I was still in "rush mode" after the PPI exam corrupted my filter, and was fully expecting to encounter a flood of questions toward the end which were going to take me 15 minutes each, so I was stupidly rushing through the questions I thought were reasonably easy. All said, there was probably only 1 or 2 questions I had to put down some type of educated guess, compared to about 40% of the questions on the PPI exam. So yeah, while PPI's practice problems are good reference material to have during the exam, I wouldn't work through them as good exam sample questions. In my opinion, you should be able to pass the Mechanical PE exam with just Marks' Handbook and maybe Lindeburg (I say the second one regrettably, since I feel someone could do a much better job at making a reference book, since that one is full of holes that don't even cover the material in their own practice exams, but the information it does present is in a little easier-to-digest and easier-to-find format than Marks').
Cheers
Personally, I am fortunate to be employed in a position where I can practice my little corner of engineering without having to maintain a PE license. I took the exam in October because I felt I owed it to myself to set my own bar a little higher and see if I could jump over it. I was eagerly awaiting my results (I live in PA which is notoriously slow in getting results back...fortunately NCEES posted my passed status a few days later, though I'm still awaiting the official results from my state board) and was frankly pretty disappointed by some of the postings I was seeing on this forum. I was also encouraged by some others, too.
First, the encouraging posts; these were usually some variation of "I didn't pass this time -- I was unprepared for the type of questions they asked" or "I did not bring the correct / enough reference materials". This is completely understandable -- the NCEES exam guide is pretty nebulous on the types and scope of questions that will be asked; it only outlines the categories of questions and roughly what percentage of the exam will cover each of those categories. The people who made posts like this are probably going to pass the next round, and will make good engineers some day.
Then, there were the posts that made me shake my head. I work in an educational institution where I see the same gamut of prospective engineers: those who try hard, and those who, well, don't; so seeing these posts wasn't a whole lot of new stuff for me. To the people who post things like, "the exam tried to trick you", "the exam is too hard", or "there were questions that weren't in my discipline", and then go on to try to blame the board and/or NCEES for making it too hard to become a PE, I can unequivocally say this: you need to take a deep, long look within and ask yourself why you are trying to become a PE. If you needed emergency surgery, I'm sure you wouldn't be eager to hop on the operating table if the surgeon had just told you, "when I took my medical board exam, the questions were too hard, so I complained and they lowered their requirements, and I finally passed after the sixth time". Engineering is basically the same thing -- the certification is to ensure the protection of life and property, since, in many fields, if something engineered (that requires a PE signoff) fails, there is a high likelihood that someone will die. In historic times, when the engineers of the Roman army would build a bridge, they were required to stand beneath it while the first legion crossed overhead. If you cannot confidently say you are willing to stand under a bridge you designed while a 50-ton crane drives over top of it, you probably need some more intern time. If you're yelling at the sky saying NCEES "tricks" you by providing too much information to sufficiently answer a question, then frankly, you have no business being an engineer -- real-world problems always come with data points that aren't needed to solve them. It is the job of a good engineer to sift through the available information and whittle it down to what is needed and what is just supporting data for someone else. If you are unable to recognize what information is needed and what isn't, that's fine -- grab a reference book.....if you spend hours searching the internet for samples of the exact problem you're trying to solve, and then just substitute your numbers into the equations without really understanding why they're needed, then you should probably find a different field to work in. If you forgot to include a factor-of-safety in your final number, that's fine, if you immediately recognize that when reviewing the answer sheet, and then learn your lesson and check factors-of-safety after every subsequent problem.....if you instead blame the exam writers for including in the possible answers a value which didn't factor in FOS, that's not them trying to trick you -- that's them weeding out a careless engineer. Let's face it, you wouldn't want to get into a plane whose wing spars were designed by an engineer who consistently forgets to include FOS values.
And finally, to those who say that computers have largely made pencil-and-paper engineering obsolete, you are fooling yourself -- computers are what's known as "garbage in - garbage out", meaning that if you design some beam to handle some load, but incorrectly set up the problem or screw up the constraints, it will give you an answer which makes no sense from an engineering standpoint, but according to the computer, is 100% valid. The difference is having the intuition to be able to recognize when the computer is feeding you garbage, and when it is giving you an answer that is within the bounds of what you'd expect. "Why yeah, this balsa-wood bridge will easily be able to support the mass of a full-sized vehicle".....is that really the case, or did you input a wrong number somewhere into the program? It is still good to do back-of-the-envelope calculations for the simpler aspects of a problem, so you have some baseline number to compare against when the computer spits some values out at you. I had an engineering student once tell me in response to a fatigue question I asked, "yes, we did fatigue analysis in the FEA -- it says it's good for over 10 million cycles, so obviously there's no problem there." Except the bracket in question was an IC engine mount, and if you use an average of 2000 rpm for the engine speed, that lifetime means it would be expected to fail after 83 hours. That's where the intuition comes into play.
One last note on preparation methods/materials: I can quite frankly say that, after purchasing the PPI practice exam, six-minute solutions, and practice problems books, I was fully expecting to fail. In fact, when I took the PPI practice exam in an exam-like environment, I think I was only able to answer ~30% of the questions in the allotted time, and only got like 50% of those correct. That was, to say the least, disheartening. Then I was fortunate to come across a post somewhere that someone who had passed the NCEES exam saying that the PPI practice exams are not only non-representative, but you also likely need an advanced degree to complete them in the expected 6 minute timeframe for each question. There were also a lot of frustrating nuances with the PPI exam, such as questions not providing Young's Modulus for the material presented (and even more bizarre -- different answers use different values for the same material). I studied a bit more, prepared a spreadsheet of most-used equations to save me some time thumbing through reference materials, and then took the NCEES practice exam and not only finished early, but got ~72%. Many of the questions I missed were "stupid mistakes" of me either not reading the question completely enough or not thinking completely through the problem....I was still in "rush mode" after the PPI exam corrupted my filter, and was fully expecting to encounter a flood of questions toward the end which were going to take me 15 minutes each, so I was stupidly rushing through the questions I thought were reasonably easy. All said, there was probably only 1 or 2 questions I had to put down some type of educated guess, compared to about 40% of the questions on the PPI exam. So yeah, while PPI's practice problems are good reference material to have during the exam, I wouldn't work through them as good exam sample questions. In my opinion, you should be able to pass the Mechanical PE exam with just Marks' Handbook and maybe Lindeburg (I say the second one regrettably, since I feel someone could do a much better job at making a reference book, since that one is full of holes that don't even cover the material in their own practice exams, but the information it does present is in a little easier-to-digest and easier-to-find format than Marks').
Cheers
