Warning regarding Dr. Mansour's Practice Exam Book

samopuddles · Nov 6, 2017

I take my surveying exam tomorrow and just had a few notes/caution. I have studied using only Dr. Mansour's textbook and practice exam book. I really enjoyed the textbook, it was well done, explanatory, and well organized. Grammar issues abound, but that's common in engineering so whatever - it's not distracting. The practice exams, however, are a complete joke!! Maybe 40/55 of the questions on each exam and helpful, well worded, etc... but in my opinion many are so poorly worded and or otherwise confusing that it's more harmful than helpful. Additionally, there are SO many mistakes throughout the book. For instance, there are four mistakes on the answer key for Exam 2. 3 wrong answers and ordered 37, 38, 38, 40. This is so confusing when you grade your exam - it says 3 are wrong when in reality it is a different answer! The solutions generally show why the answer is such but many do not give a thorough explanation that you may be used to with other review book makers.

My main gripe, however, is the CBT tool. Due to formatting, many of the questions are not even multiple choice questions! One tells you "Draw a countour map" and you are supposed to pick A, B, C, or D which have no answers. LOL! Other questions reference a figure that is not even shown, so you are expected to go through your texts and find it I guess? Once you finish, it gives you a print out with your results and in just one I took there were several questions that just didn't even have an answer selected. It would just say "Correct Answer" and was blank, despite the fact that there should have been one. Very very frustrating, these are features that are proudly boasted about when you are looking to buy it.

Anyway, just very disappointed in the quality of the practice exam book, especially considering how well put together I found Dr. Mansour's textbook to be (which I do recommend).

cal91 · Nov 8, 2017

So after the exam how prepared did you feel? I took the exam last week.

samopuddles · Nov 8, 2017

cal91 said:
So after the exam how prepared did you feel? I took the exam last week.

I honestly can't tell. I studied a lot for seismic (EET class, practice exam, etc...) and walked out of it thinking I probably missed 5-8 at most. The survey exam I studied for just over a week with Mansour's book and two exams only, maybe an hour or two per day. I left the exam thinking I definitely knew how to do probably 50/55 of the questions but may have missed a step or been tricked here and there. Basically I feel like I either was prepared and wasn't tricked and passed by a mile or I was over confident and under prepared and missed a lot on silly mistakes/misunderstandings. I was surprised at how many of the questions required just basic trigonometry considering the practice exams I took had maybe 5 questions like that.

Anyway, from the wording of several questions I caught them trying to be more "tricky" than the seismic exam - really trying to test both your knowledge and attention to detail.

cal91 · Nov 9, 2017

Yeah that's how I felt also. I went through and got 49/55 first time around. Then went back and got 5/6. Had to guess on the last one as time ran out. I feel like you, I either passed by a mile or I wasn't careful enough and made a lot of mistakes from trying to rush through or thinking too immediately that I knew exactly how to do it.

samopuddles · Nov 9, 2017

cal91 said:
Yeah that's how I felt also. I went through and got 49/55 first time around. Then went back and got 5/6. Had to guess on the last one as time ran out. I feel like you, I either passed by a mile or I wasn't careful enough and made a lot of mistakes from trying to rush through or thinking too immediately that I knew exactly how to do it.

That makes me feel better, it seems that if you're good at trig and took a good survey course in college you should be well prepared. Otherwise it would be a very confusing topic and difficult to study for so many years out of school. Do you by chance know when to expect results? I can't find anything definitive, assuming early/mid December for now.