PE Exam: Game Day

 

Most successful exam takers recommend doing nothing but relaxing the day before taking the 8-hour Professional Engineering exam. I ignored their advice. I had finished a practice exam the previous Saturday, but it was only on the day before test-day that I had time to rework missed problems.

Even on test day, between breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express and the test center opening, I ran through my flashcards with important formulae- rules of thumb- not included in the test handbook.  

I prepared snacks and lunch in portioned bags, placing them in my test candidate’s locker. Save brainpower for the test, instead of thinking about what to eat. In previous times, PE exam candidates, like lawyers aiming for the State Bar, would convene at certain convention-like centers around the state on a given day. Now, nearly all tests are offered at Pearson’s Professional Testing Centers, which serve members of various trades and professions, including nurses, EMTs, and dentists.

At least at the center I tested at, order of seating is given on a first-come, first-serve basis, so anxious individuals with a 2-hour exam could be seated ahead of full-day examinees. But there was a silver lining in the wait, as I decided to take my morning break early. If was fortuitous that I could plug-and-chug until lunchtime.

It had been several years since I sat for a major exam, so, like plunging into the cold water of the hotel pool, I remembered to mind my breathing and heart rate (My grad school program in Systems Engineering had no timed tests, just projects and reports).

Unlike most every other academic exam, the NCEES’ PE exam is a test that is about endurance, strategy, and time management. It is a test where perfection is erroneous, and where you are expected to skip questions to better manage time- an average of 6 minutes per question. Indeed, PhD’s are often permitted to skip this exam on the road to state licensure- their work is quite different from the constraints faced by ordinary practitioners of the engineering profession.

 I took the Mechanical- HVAC version, which errs towards the blue-collar side of the PE exams that NCEES offers. In this test, the writers want to ensure that someone long out of college, but dedicated to the industry, can pass the exam. I reviewed refrigeration questions from the US Coast Guard’s Marine Engineering test series, which is heavily focused on practical applications; several questions were direct hits.  

Each half of the test is about the same length in questions. But there is no cutoff clock for the first half, so you could pace 4 hours and 4 hours, or 3 hours and 5 hours between the halves. To reduce stress, I was not going to allot extra time to the first half of the exam, since the second half is traditionally the harder- and time-consuming half.

In the first half, I recall that I spent too much time on one question, then had to shoot-from-the hip on one I could have calculated. It resembled a practice problem, so I chose the answer from memory. It turned out the second half of the exam was the easier one, this cycle. (Four versions of the test are issued each year, and April 1 was the first day of a new test version). I definitely was dragging by question 75, out of 80, yet I had time to rework uncertain problems, and leave the test center 20 minutes ahead of time.

At the end of the exam, I had a high level of confidence, which waned with second-guessing myself the next day. A missed fundamental concept, such as confusing latent heat with sensible heat, could cost 7 questions, and the test-writers know which wrong answers to give as choices. One missed fundamental leaves little room for other errors, for the average-performing test taker. And of the fill-in-the-blank questions, what was the leeway given for rounding errors? The never specified the number of decimal points to give.

 With the computer-based test, I completed the exam on Friday, April 1, and received results on the following Wednesday. I couldn’t bear to see what I might see, but I saw the green bar of success! As I have completed all of the other state prerequisites for licensure (education, references, and an ethics exam), I am just waiting on the official letter to come from Richmond, VA.

As I sat on the tailgate of my car, having completed the test, I wondered at the feeling of having completed “the last test of your life”. For many of my undergraduate classmates at the US Merchant Marine Academy, comprehensive tests for the US Coast Guard Merchant Mariner License were the end of their academic careers. We had a profession for life, if sailing as a mariner is what we wanted.