r/PE_Exam

I failed the PE Civil Transportation exam about 2 months ago. I used EET videos, quizzes, and exams + the NCEES practice exam, but felt like I did well on the actual exam.
This time I’m going through the EET binder properly, which I didn’t do before. I’m deciding between:

CEA Ultimate Transportation
PPI Transportation — 2 Full Practice Exams
Jacob Petro — 160 CBT Questions
School of PE — Full Exam

Which would you recommend for realistic timed practice? Is PPI worth the extra cost, or would you go with CEA, Petro, or School of PE?

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Hello there. Just looking for some general information from people who took a PE Exam in a discipline that was different from their FE and/or from what they studied in university (college).

What was your FE or University study in? How difficult of a transition was it to study for an exam where you had to switch gears in a sense? What helped best prepare you? How long did you take to study and how many tries until you passed?

I have been stalking this subreddit but figured I would post a question to get more ideas. I plan to take Mechanical TFS due to the nature of a job I will have without any prior Mechanical Engineering knowledge.

I’m taking the California surveying exam and I’m currently using CPESR to prepare.

For those who have taken the actual exam, how similar did you find CPESR to the real exam? Is CPESR enough on its own, or would you recommend using another resource as well?

Also, for those who didn’t pass on their first attempt, what was the main reason? Was it mostly time management, or were the questions themselves significantly more challenging/different from the practice exams?

I’d really appreciate any advice, especially from anyone who recently took the exam. Thank you!

Do you review cheat sheets, solve practice problems, or watch lectures from your subscribed course? I know it depends heavily on your office, manager, and relationship with them, but what has actually worked for you?

Looking for practical ideas to make the most of small pockets of time during the workday.

Hello everyone. I just found out last week that I failed the PE Electrical: Power exam for the second time. For reference, I am ~3 years into my career, took the exam the first time in May after around 2.5 months of studying, then again earlier this month after 3 months of studying. Both times it appears from my diagnostic that I was close, just had some conceptual gaps. I improved from try 1 to now, but I know the conceptual questions in the second half did me in. I have been using Zach Stone's course the whole time and, while it is incredible, I think I need more because I'm worried I'm memorizing answers instead of learning. What advice for other resources do yall have? I am considering Wasims course, but I've already spent a lot of money so hopefully something cheaper. I want to pass by the end of the year, but let me know if this may be too ambitious. Any advice is welcome, and thank you in advance!

I recently passed the Transportation Exam and when I worked for Georgia DOT I did not work under any PE, should I still try to still have my old manager verify my work history while at Georgia DOT?

Hey everyone! Just wondering if anyone has their exam scheduled within the next couple of months. If so, how are your studies going so far?

I’m still working through the EET on-demand material, and I also have the NCEES practice exam. I was curious if you guys have found any other resources or study methods that have been especially helpful, particularly for getting better at the conceptual questions.

I’m open to any advice, practice exams, resources, study strategies, or anything else you feel has helped increase your chances of passing.

Good luck to everyone studying!

Is anyone else completely miserable trying to study from the Petro PE book? Every single problem feels overly complicated and honestly doesn't even feel relevant to the actual NCEES exam format. It’s supposed to be prep, but instead, it just makes me feel helpless with every question.

Hi everyone!

I have 5 engagements on my application, but 4 references have approved / signed off. I do not believe I’ll be getting a response from the 5th engagement. Will my application still go through to technical review? Do I need to contact the Board about this?

I do not know my results yet. Spent about 5 months and used the School of PE on demand service. I would say it was just okay. Not bad if you want repetitive practice on easier questions that drill down the concepts you need to know, but insufficient as a true challenge. I also used Petros book, which I found to be very challenging but a good resource.

The exam was difficult. A good bit harder than the NCEES practice exam, but not as hard as Petros book. It’s really about how they ask things and sometimes you can’t believe how creative they can get with wording a question. If it was more straightforward, I would have probably felt great coming out, but due to the uniqueness of a good handful of questions I left feeling pretty unsure. I’d say I straight up guessed on 5-7.

I don’t feel there is a good way to really prepare yourself for their flavor of question or the trickiness. My best advice is to get your hands on as many difficult practice questions as you can so your brain is trained to think through hard ones. Just for my sanity, did anyone feel disappointed with their performance and end up passing? Haha

Hi all,

I am applying for my PE application in VA and looked at their application form, it does not list any references. Does anyone have experience with this?

I thought I needed 3 references when I checked the forms last year. The current one is updated on 07/01 and looks like they removed it.

Please let me know if you applied for PE after July!

Edit: I called them and asked about this, they said they have removed the reference requirements and to follow the latest forms on the website.

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MS with structural focus, 2 YOE, passed the FE first time right out of undergrad. Started at my current role at a state government DOT (bridge design) in summer 2024.

Took the PE first time in March after studying for around 5 months. Failed (walked out feeling like I ate shit, I had to take a wild guess on 15-20 questions at the end because I didn't have time even touch them) but was fairly close to the passing average, so I decided to jump back into it relatively quick. Began studying again in May and took it for the second time last week (first week of August).

__________

Takeaways I think will help others:

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Knowing the concepts is only half of it. If you don't have the basic test taking strategy down (and that's not even engineering) it means nothing.

I put 300+ hours into the first attempt but didn't really practice under a real time constraint simulating the exam.

I leaned too hard on thinking that if I knew the concepts well enough I would be fine (this is how I operated on exams in school and it generally worked).

Even if you know the concepts inside and out it means fuck all if you cannot get enough questions right in 8 hours.

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If retaking it, diagnose weak areas by cause, not by topic.

The diagnostic if you fail tells "where" you lost points, but not "why". At first I thought I just need to hardcore study categories 1 and 2 (Loads and Forces/Force Effects) since those seemed to have dragged down my score below the passing threshold.

Wasn't until a month before the second attempt that I realized I just need to drill doing problems under a time constraint since that's why I left so many problems untouched the first time and that led to failure.

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Flashcards are a gem.

There's actually a lot of formulas and pieces of info you actually need to memorize for the exam and it's not found in any of the codes, I only figured this out after I started writing stuff that I knew had to be memorized and filled up 2 pages.

Even things written in the codes should be memorized to save time which again ties into the importance of time management for this exam.

For instance, it says in the fine print of AISC why the G factor is 10 for a pinned support but it'd take a couple minutes to locate that if I didn't know. After putting that on a flashcard and drilling it so many times, on the exam my brain immediately jumped to "ok, for this structure G=10 here and I know that for sure because of the card" and it saved a ton of time.

I used an app (Anki) that could sync any cards I added between both my work computer and phone. It was helpful to just drill the flashcards as a low-capacity task while walking around, waiting in line, etc etc. basically in any situation where I couldn't sit down and study with the rest of the material. Not to mention the act of making the flashcards in the first place was also review.

EDIT: because a lot of people wanted these flashcards, send me a DM for that

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AI is a gem too if used right.

I wouldn't trust it to generate problems for me or solve question bank ones (nor write this reddit post lmfao), but I found out that Claude was very good checking work I already did and diagnosing mistakes.

I would attempt each problem cold on paper with a timer running (no more than 6 minutes per problem), then input into Claude three things: the problem statement, my full written work including my reasoning for each step, and the official provided solution. Then have it spit out what went wrong and why.

Doing this across a few hundred problems was even better, since AI started flagging patterns across all of them that I wouldn't have pieced together on my own. This is actually how I figured out my issue was time management and not concept gaps.

Claude suggested several fixes for my recurring problem execution mistakes:

-Before touching the calculator write down exactly what's being asked with the qualifier words and units still attached, then every given quantity with its units.

-reread the question twice before starting to work it, and twice again before selecting an answer

-set a strict time cap: if I spend over 6 minutes on a problem, move onto another one, but make sure to write down a quick note of exactly where I left off and/or what step to do next, so that way when I return to an unfinished problem I don't waste time getting up to speed on it again. (The second part of this was crucial)

This time management tactic was probably the biggest difference between the first and second attempts, before narrowing this down and practicing it I would sink up to 30 minutes on a single problem which obviously wasted a lot of time and wouldn't fly on the exam.

I think this is what ultimately helped me pass (narrowing down the time management issue as the biggest one and being able to focus on that).

On the second attempt I did actually run out of time again, but there were only 5 questions across the entire exam where I had to pick a random letter due to lack of time to work them, which is much better than up to 20 of those!

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Unfortunately there is a luck component at the end of the day.

The draw of 80 questions is variable and you can do everything right but still get handed a cluster from the one area you practiced least. That's not a reason to prepare less but I think it's a reason to build margin for sure. The set of questions I got the second time included much more straightforward ones than the first attempt.

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Don't tell people at work until it's done.

Before the first attempt I mentioned "I'm taking my PE on [day]" as office small talk, so the week after I took it I was constantly getting asked how it went, which made admitting the fail much worse. When people started asking when I am retaking it, I said "sometime this summer" without giving a specific date, and they eventually just forgot and stopped asking. That way If I did fail again there wouldn't be as much of a peanut gallery.

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Studying (or doing anything demanding, period) the night before is useless.

I was trying to fire off several practice problems before both attempts and in hindsight it was a waste of time and just stressed me out more.

Neither time did anything I touched that night help me the next day on the exam. I would've just relaxed and tried to go to bed earlier (for the second attempt I was also running on 4 hours of sleep, do not recommend. The test center proctor even asked me "sir are you fully awake" when I first got checked into the exam room lmfao)

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Just open the result when you get it because that was set in stone on exam day anyway.

The day of getting the result was clearly my most nerve-wracking moment in recent memory, because I thought the odds of passing were "slightly better than a coin flip" and the stakes were a lot higher time if I failed.

I got the email at 9 am, decided I'm not going to open it in the office and wait until I get home, which was stupid in hindsight because then I just spent the whole day ruminating...

It really felt like I was going to either find out it's Christmas in August, or that my dog died, with no in-between...luckily after I got home, christmas came early with the green "pass" icon. But it was really not worth that much anxiety dragged out for a while.

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This exam fucking sucks. But reframing it as just one "gate" helped me a lot.

everyone in this field needs to take it at some point or the other. And it's just one way to gatekeep a credential and should not be a reflection on your competence as an engineer.

I like to think of the PE like a driving skills test, I failed that a couple times (parallel parking is a bitch) and didn't get my license until almost 19; while it was definitely frustrating during that period, eventually I did pass, got the license and moved on. There's no restrictions on driving as opposed to if I passed it the first time because it's just one gate and once it is cleared, no one cares.

Similarly I struggled a lot early in college, got double academic probation 1st year and ended up taking statics 3 times. But after that gate (and everything after it) was eventually cleared, no one gave a flying fuck how many classes I had to repeat or how long I took to graduate.

Hell if failing statics was the end of it then I would have never been able to go into the structures side! This was honestly the mantra in my head going forward especially when I got frustrated while studying for the second attempt and had thoughts of putting it off further or just quitting.

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Take it ASAP if you can.

Most states have decoupled it where you can sit the PE anytime as long as your FE is complete. I don't regret taking it prior to reaching the experience for licensure. This gave me enough time where I knew that even if I did fail once or twice I would likely get it done before there was more pressure to pass and get licensed.

A lot of my coworkers who are also entry level said they're just going to wait until the 4 years experience mark and then think of it, but I knew if I did that then the exam would just be dragged on for longer, not to mention my workload would also build up over time and cut into bandwidth for exam prep.

I also took advantage of a slower job to study, part of it was knowing I wouldn't be at this position forever so I should knock out this thing under the easiest possible conditions.

Even though I did obviously have to spend evenings and weekends doing it and sacrifice a lot of free time (especially the last couple months before each attempt were just work, study, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat), being able to double dip some work hours to study definitely helped take the edge off.

Wanting some advice from recent PE Construction test takers.

Which reference manuals would you recommend to buy and get familiar with.

I do not have the funds nor the time to thoroughly review them all so what 2-3 are absolutely necessary.

I am using the EET On Demand course which seems to be going over the tables that are important.

Thank you

Hi All,

Can anyone tell me whether all of the codes provided during the exam are searchable, or if there are any that do not allow you to search for specific words?

Thank you!