For the young Civil Engineer, it is the time when the PE Exam looms.  Colleagues who took the exam in October have just got the results.  For a small majority (as the NCEES statistics show) the results were good.  So for a chunky minority, and a group of PE newcomers, the holidays are overshadowed by the exam that still must be overcome.

So what can this College Professor and PE Coach offer?  Well, if you’re heading for the exam in April, the very best advice is to start preparing early.  If you’re like my undergraduate students, you are familiar with cramming.  You know how to procrastinate.  And you know how to work really hard when you’re close to a test.  Sadly, this well practiced technique won’t help you for the PE.  It is a bad habit because you simply can’t cram this exam in the way you did in College.  It’s such a different kind of exam.  It’s like taking two exams for your entire Junior and Senior years.  Amusingly, these stages are called “years”; laughable because few undergraduates get through them in two years.  Most take more.  So you’re preparing for the PE exam that addresses content that you acquired over perhaps 36 months.  Worse, much of the material is a hazy memory and while it can be dug out, it’s not that easy.  And worse, there’s so much of it.

All this means that you need to take a completely different approach to this exam.  You must prepare as a runner prepares for the Olympics.  You must work at it gently, but consistently.  The mind has a mind of its own.  It needs time to assimilate, process, and sort.  This is why 20 minutes a day for 100 days is so much more powerful than 5 hours a day for a week.  Certainly, the one-week immersion is much better than nothing.  But it’s less effective.  Like a crash diet, it’s unnatural and the benefits are temporary.  Worse, it’s nasty.

So my young Civil Engineer, if you’re preparing for the PE in April, start preparing today.  You need to put in about the same time as you have getting to this fourth paragraph.  Get your materials together.  Choose your method of preparation.  Identify the total.  Divide it into 100 little bite-sized pieces, and start nibbling.  If you’re thinking of the October exam, your commitment will be even less.

Most engineers design and build little things: engines, artificial hips, sensors, and microchips are small. Civil Engineers design and build big and dangerous things. Civil Engineers construct infrastructure that everybody uses: Highways, docks, bridges, hydroelectric plants, sewage treatment facilities. They are all big. And Civil Engineering projects are usually one-of-a-kind.

We get one chance to get it right, and if it’s not right, the consequences are bad. The project fails to serve the public for its required lifespan wasting everyone’s money. Worse, structures can fail dramatically bringing injury and death. So when an Engineer designs a new iPod, it doesn’t carry the societal weight of a dam, or a railroad.

Civil Engineers, therefore, are most constrained by the public welfare. That welfare addresses the public purse, and public safety. This is why for Civil Engineers, the Civil PE Exam has more impact, more widely on their professional development than other branches of engineering. Civil Engineers, more than any other branch of engineering, have to certify and stamp their work.

So, if you’re preparing for that important Civil Engineering Professional Exam, make sure you prepare in the way Civil Engineers do: carefully and comprehensively. Because, for Civil Engineers, size matters!

You've been taking exams for years

The PE Exam is longer than any exam you ever took in college – your professor would have been fired for setting two 4-hour finals in one day. The only practice you’ve had is the FE exam. Pacing is so different – we’re used to working on problems that take 20-30 minutes. The PE format means there’s about only 6 minutes per question.

Mystery Questions

You’ve never taken an exam like the morning (breadth) exam whereby problems from 5 disciplines are jumbled together in one exam. When you took a water engineering exam, as a student, you expected each question to be wet. But in the morning PE exam, question one could be a truss analysis. Question two could be about bacteria and question three could be about a traffic light. So there’s no consistency and no comfort from consistency.

Worse, it’s often difficult to distinguish between disciplines. Questions can mix different areas. For example, a highway project may feature an earthwork component. When you encounter this problem, you ask yourself “is this Construction, Transportation, or Geotechnics?” But remember, the examiners are assessing your ability to practice as licensed engineers. It’s only in school that your problems are categorized for you. The examiners are striving to expose you to real Civil Engineering problems.

The PE Exam is a marathon, not a sprint. How often are we expected to sit and focus intently for two 4-hour periods? We are simply not used to the pressure of such a tough day. Consider an example of one of the most intense scenarios at work. You’re a construction engineer supervising a major concrete pour for a bridge deck. Even then, there’ll be time for a quick cup of coffee. Try taking 15 minutes off on PE Exam day!

One of the tricks I’ve borrowed from the professional examiners is the practice of supplying redundant information in problem statements. While my University students don’t like my supplying irrelevant information in their problems, the presence of redundant information forces them to think.

It’s so natural for us to “question spot”. That’s the practice whereby we “sniff” the problem so that we can quickly find out its nature. Then, when we’ve done a similar one before, we can simply insert the template and crank out the solution. I tell my own students that I supply redundant information because I set them Civil Engineering problems. I’m sure they’re all competent at algebra. I want my students to be forced to think about the problems, and suspect that the PE Examiners have a similar motivation.

So what does all this mean in terms of your preparation? Well, your preparation should take two forms. First, you need to prepare for the exam content. Second, you need to prepare for the exam format. Even if your content preparation is excellent, you were a 4.0 student, and you remember every thing you learned, you can still slip up on format. We all need to prepare for the unusual nature of the daylong exam.

Pass the PE Exam by preparing cleverly. Those old college methods won’t work here!

The fundamentals of engineering exam is likely the only exam that we’ll have taken that takes 8 hours. If we passed first time, we at least have that preparation. However, the exam format is so long and so unusual that we really need to prepare. The best way to get into the right approach to the PE Exam is practice. This kind of preparation is quite different from content preparation. Given enough time and a good library, we could all get a passing grade. But what about 6 minutes per question? This means our content preparation has to be thorough and we must practice jumping from mini question to mini question. The best way to prepare kind be likened to marathon running preparation. Fitness gurus tell us that we need to be running 18 miles to be able to run a 26-mile marathon. Similarly, if you have sat down to an uninterrupted two-hour session maybe three or four times, you’ll be ready to tackle the actual PE Exam with confidence.

So here’s my prescription. When you’ve covered the content and are ready to tackle the majority of problems, set aside some completely quiet time. The home can be full of distractions with family, phones, and doorbells. If you want to simulate the exam experience at home, set yourself up without distractions. Turn off your computer. Better yet, try these trail runs at 9AM and 1PM. Our body clocks are all different. Some of us warm up by midday. Others are ready early and fade. Pick your weaker time and set up your practice.

If you can’t isolate yourself at home for 2 hours, the public library is a good environment, because there will be other people in the background, and you’ll less likely to be distracted. Stay away from the children’s section.

Take your problem exams into your practice space without the solutions – just the questions. Twenty questions gives you a two-hour shot. Don’t peek at the questions ahead of time. When you go through the exercise you’ll experience the irritation of not quite understanding a problem. You’ll get to spend 10 minutes on one problem and two minutes on another. You’ll know what it’s like to go back to a problem and change your answer. You’ll know what it’s like to scribble your calculations in a way that won’t earn “partial credit”.

When the 120 minutes are over, take a break. Then go through the solutions in detail and reflect on the answers you modified, and how you felt as you took each problem. If you got 14 right, you’re in great shape because it loosely indicates that you’re at a passing level. If you’re under 14, don’t fret. Simply take a day or so off and repeat the process. Take time to review problems you got hopelessly wrong to prepare you for the next test. Remember, knowing what you don’t know is as important as knowing your strengths.

So, what’s the best way to prepare for the PE exam format? Practice, practice, and practice – but only after your content preparation is done.

There are two key aspects to PE Exam preparation. You need to prepare for the content, and you need to prepare for the exam format. Let’s first look at the content.

We all graduated from accredited schools which means that we are all prepared for the content of the exam. Right? Wrong! Our content background is as diverse as our ethnicity, our gender, and our personalities. The examiners job is to safeguard the public and uphold the finest traditions of the Civil Engineering profession. The examiners want to establish a common set of minimum standards for our nations Civil Engineers.

The process begins by a body known as “ABET” – an acronym for the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. ABET currently accredits some 2,700 programs at over 550 colleges and universities nationwide. ABET is recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. For Civil and Environmental Engineering, its job is to assess the quality of degree programs. You are taking the PE Exam, because you have a degree from an ABET approved program. This ensures that your professors had the right qualifications, your degree program had the right content, and many other factors such as the adequacy of your school’s lab facilities. It doesn’t mean that you were attentive, five years ago in the structures classes. It doesn’t guarantee that you geotechnics professor covered the unified soil classification method. It doesn’t assert that you really understood the area end method for earthworks calculations.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses. We all have professors who perhaps didn’t quite connect to us. So however good we were, there will always be gaps and deficiencies. And what about those codes and manuals we used as undergrads? Sometimes the exam requires codes that have been updated, sometimes overhauled, and sometimes replaced. So why should we have to be tested on references that didn’t even exist when we were undergraduates? Because we’re applying to be accepted into a profession. And that means that we willingly submit to the code that requires us to stay up to date – lifelong learning.

So, in preparing for the content of the exam, we need to have a clear understanding of how much we know and what we don’t know. The Examiners expect a broad based understanding, and it’s up to us to plug the gaps. Now if you’re a Water Engineer, you may ask ‘why should I have to know about Critical path Methods, and Equilibrium Theory?” The answer is that you’re applying to become a licensed Professional Engineer in “Civil Engineering”. So, even though your specialty may be project management or structural design, you should have a broad understanding of the profession to which you aspire to join. You would expect a Brain Surgeon to understand the difference between a fracture and a sprain. So too must a Finite Elements designer know the difference between a settlement tank and an aerobic filter.

Turning to the actual content preparation, remember you’re effectively looking at work that spanned your junior and senior years at college. Picking up those weighty manuals can be a little daunting. Even if you were the most organized of students, 4 or more semesters of lecture notes, handouts, lab reports, homeworks, and exam scripts makes quite a bundle. So where should you begin?

There are excellent manuals and preparation books. Just don’t be overwhelmed by their size and weight. There are classes which can be very useful. And of course, there’s PeReview.net where you can tailor your preparation to your weaknesses, leaving your strengths to a quick brush-up.

In summary, the PE Exam is a long and broad sweeping ordeal. Preparation is essential, and can’t be the same for everyone.

The Professional Engineering Exam for Civil Engineers and why it differs from all those college tests you took!

The American Society of Civil Engineers adopted a Code of Ethics on September 2nd, 1914. Like the Constitution, it has been amended with the latest as recently as July, 2006. Canon 7 is one of the seven fundamental components of the Code. It states:

“Engineers shall continue their professional development throughout their careers, and shall provide opportunities for the professional development of those engineers under their supervision.”

This means that a degree in Civil Engineering marks the beginning of your learning, not the fulfillment. An accredited degree in Civil Engineering is a passport to board the good ship profession. The degree is not a destination.

So when the examiners compile the Professional Engineering Exam, they have the concept of a profession in mind. This means that as a professional engineer, you are expected to uphold its ethical values. Canon 7 identifies that professional engineers should continue to learn. It goes further:

“Engineers should keep current in their specialty fields by engaging in professional practice, participating in continuing education courses, reading in the technical literature, and attending professional meetings and seminars.”

Sometimes the PE exam will require you to simply know something, or more commonly, know where to find it. As a professional engineer, you are expected to be able to access information.

This goes some way to explaining why in the professional engineering exam, there are often obscure questions that require you to dig into some heavy reference and simply look something up. So prepare carefully, and take that exam because it will open the door to you becoming a real professional.