The Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) exam is an 80 question, 9 hour test designed to test competency in a particular engineering discipline for engineers who have gained a minimum of four years post-college work experience. The test is created by NCEES. This is step 2 of a 2 step testing process.
I think a little background is needed here. My bachelor’s (undergraduate) degree was Computer Engineering. My master’s (graduate) degree was Electrical Engineering with a signal/image/video processing emphasis. I had been a practicing engineer for more than 20 years. I graduated from the undergrad in 2002 and went straight to work as an engineer. It was 2024. I had two small children and businesses to run. I had just passed the FE test prior to this.
After doing some research, I learned that there were 12 different discipline categories. Inside each category, the are several disciplines.
My closest fit category was Electrical & Computer. Inside my category are three disciplines: “Computer Engineering”, “Electronics, Controls, Communications”, and “Power”. I chose Power for three reasons.
1. I had spent my professional career inside of the first two disciplines, but never needed a PE license. They are not in demand. They would have been easier tests for me, but less useful.
2. Since the others aren’t in demand, those tests are only offered once a year. You may have to wait a year to test, then another year for each retest.
3. The others don’t have anything to do with real estate. Buildings need power. That’s why the Power test is offered all year round. You may retest every three months.
Here are the knowledge testing areas at the time for the PE – Electrical & Computer – Power exam.
This material was mostly new to me and I knew this would be more difficult than the FE. I immediately noticed something different, a Codes and Standards section. That means code books. You can see all six of them above. In all of my years of experience, I had never needed a code book.
Again, luckily for me, there are online classes that teach to this test. Several in fact. I reviewed the top four or five, but I was now biased. I had used the School of PE to successfully pass the FE. The reviews for them were not great. There were a few of the “You get what you pay for” type of negativity that I usually disregard as fake. There was one that said something along the line of “They are good for the FE, but not so good for the PE”. I really should have listened to that one. I didn’t.
I selected School of PE. They were, again, less expensive than the other options, while still providing the same type of environment. It’s a website with all of the study materials. They had recorded class videos that could be viewed as many times as needed, class notes, example problems for each of the sections, a test bank of example “test-like” problems, and a practice exam that they mailed to me in hard copy. I chose to have access to the study material for 6 months.
This class was very different from the FE. The entire class was taught by the same person. He completely ignored the text book as well as the class notes. There was no lecture portion. Instead, he went straight to the problems for each section. I remember him saying “We are going to let the problems resolve the theory” many times. The entire class, all 16 sessions, consisted of him solving the problems all by himself. Several times, he reached an answer that differed from the solutions. When asked about it by the students, he replied that “I am right, the solutions are wrong”. He worked the material out of order and didn’t cover large sections of the information from the NCEES outline.
I tried to read their textbook. It was clumsy and felt unfinished to me. I think it was written by several different people independently, then put together without an editor to create cohesive flow. Many sections really needed more work. It was very difficult for me to understand. The class notes had a very similar feel. The creator copied and pasted chunks from the textbook to create slides. They were hundreds of slides long.
I felt frustrated by the class. I wish he would have taught a class from the lecture notes and allowed me to work the problems myself. I believe that is how I learn best. I was also concerned that we spent little or no time on the code books and many parts of the outline above. I decided to work the problems again, from the beginning, all by myself. The problem was that I already knew the answers.
It took me about two months before I felt comfortable enough to schedule the test. I scheduled for two weeks from then. I also purchased the practice exam from NCEES. It was inexpensive and supposed to be exactly like the real test. In the next two weeks, I worked the two practice exams along with some of the class material problems again.
The night before the test I remember feeling pretty confident. I even told my wife that I was “as prepared as I could possibly be by the class” and decided to watch a movie with her and go to bed early for a good night’s sleep.
I usually test very well. At that test, I knew I was in trouble in the first 30 minutes. The point of the questions was completely different from that of the class. Even worse, there were many questions from code books that we had never covered or even opened. There were so many other questions about material that I had never seen. I felt like as if I hadn’t taken a class and just went in blind. It was the longest 9 hours of my life. I did the best I could, but I already knew the outcome. I estimate that I had to completely guess, not even an educated guess, on about half of the questions.
I remember telling my dad on the drive home that he would have done just as well on that test as I did. No difference between he or I taking the test. He laughed. I didn’t.
No pins or needles waiting for the result. I did not expect to pass. I began researching alternatives in order to be better prepared to retake the test. I didn’t sign up or pay yet because I hadn’t been told the result officially.
They took two weeks to respond with the result. Finally the result came. I failed. They give a nice diagnostic when you fail, but it didn’t mean much for me. I knew the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t comprehend the material. The problem was that I had not yet seen or reviewed the material.
NCEES makes you wait for three months after you fail the PE exam before you can retest. I had read that, but I never actually expected to fail. This was the first time in my life that I had failed a test. It really depressed me. I knew that it only took three extra months of my life and a few hundred dollars, but it felt so much worse.
At this point I had to decide if I should sign up for a whole new class or just download better practice exams and use free resources. The price really didn’t matter to me. I just needed to get a grip on the material and the testing structure. I found several sources have options to buy just practice exams with detailed solutions.
Engineering Pro Guides sold six separate exams with varying concentrations of the material.
Electrical PE Review sold two separate exams and one had only Alternative Item Type (AIT) questions.
PPI2Pass sold all the their study materials separately.
I decided to buy all of the practice exams from all three sources and get to work. I had three months to burn and I knew that any time off would be to my detriment. It would take me a while to work through all of these tests. I decided that I would sign up for a new class if I still felt clueless when working these practice tests.
My knowledge deficiency was made apparent immediately by these practice exams. They helped me immensely to understand what went wrong in round one. I was missing large portions of the material and almost all of the theoretical underpinning. Many questions on the exam are theory based. Theory based questions don’t have numbers. Instead, they tend to ask about relationships between inter-workings of systems.
It took me about two months to get through the new practice exams using the given solutions, various internet forums, YouTube, and several helpful websites. I scheduled for the first available date after my NCEES blackout window. In the remaining month, I reviewed all of the purchased practice exams again.
The night before the test I remember feeling anxious. That’s an odd emotion for me with testing. I guess that’s because the feeling of failing in the first round really got to me. I didn’t sleep very well at all.
Test day finally arrived. It was definitely the best experience of all three testing days. I finished in 6 hours and took an hour to review. I submitted my answers and left with 2 hours to spare.
No pins or needles waiting for that result. I knew that I would pass during the test. I just needed the result officially to move on to the next step in the journey.
They took two weeks to respond with the result. Finally the result came. I had passed. That’s all the information they give when you pass. I never knew how many questions I missed. I would have liked to know that. Oh well, time to work an my application for PE!