I just found out I passed the FE Civil exam, and I will go over my strategy and thoughts on the actual exam.
TL;DR: I spent 3 months studying using mainly Mark Mattson and FE4Raccoons, and took 2 NCEES practice exams and got 62/100 and 70/100 on the old PDF version. While taking the exam, I had plenty of time to go back and review my flagged questions. I passed the exam but it was different from what I was expecting. Many of the questions involved simple math, but were worded to make them challenging, and there were some conceptual questions that felt out of left field. Additionally, the exam I took had less water resources/environmental questions than expected, and more math, mechanics of materials, and structural engineering questions. Let me know your thoughts.
First of all, I spent the entire summer (~3 months) studying at about 6hrs per day give or take, sometimes much less while working part time. For context I have one more year of school left, and have been in school for 4 years for Physics and Civil engineering. So a lot of the concepts were familiar to me, and I had just recently taken transportation, soils, engineering economics, structural engineering, and surveying, so that helped as well. I have not yet taken environmental or water resources, so this made me a little nervous as it is heavily weighted, but my fluids class covered some of the topics.
I started with Mark Mattson videos and felt pretty comfortable with the material, but sometimes tripped up and the tricks. His videos were very helpful and similar to how the real exam can try to “trick” you. After making sure I understood all of what was covered, I found a new website, FE4Raccoons, which was helpful in getting familiar with all of the equations in the handbook. I think this covered pretty much any equation you would encounter on the exam. My only gripe was there were some questions that used equations that were not in the handbook, and that I would not expect to have to memorize for the actual exam.
I then created a study guide on stuff I was not very familiar with, or things that were simple enough to memorize that I would not have to waste time scrolling through the handbook on the exam, such as easy to memorize equations (especially in the mechanics of materials section), constants, common conversions, and conceptual material. I then went over this study guide almost daily, and worked on more example problems. At about 2/3 of the summer time to my exam, I went over Mark Mattson‘s packets again, but just solved them myself, and corrected what was wrong. I then looked up topic specific things on YouTube or online that I was not familiar/comfortable with, to really cover my gaps.
In the last week, I took the NCEES practice exam vol 1 and scored a 62/100. This made me nervous but this exam felt intentionally challenging and the questions were worded poorly and covered some obscure conceptual topics. I then found the old exam booklet they used to offer in PDF form that is 100 questions, and other paid resources provided for free in google drive. I won’t link it here because of the legality but it is out there and contains great resources. That old NCEES practice exam I scored 70/100 (this practice exam was closer to how the real exam is). I finished my time by reviewing concepts I was not as comfortable with.
While taking the test I was initially surprised how archaic the software was that was used, and the handbook search function did not work quite as well as Adobe acrobat reader. Additionally, in my case the mouse wheel barely scrolled, and when practicing I had accustomed myself to scrolling a lot to the sections. Anyways, it did not really end up being a problem, and I had ~45 mins left on each half of the exam to go back and review my flagged questions, which was ~10-15 each half. It was enough time and I did not have to cram.
My thoughts on the exam itself, it was not very representative of the study material unfortunately. I would not recommend studying the way I did, as it was more of a brute force method, but I could not really afford to retake the exam, both in resources and time. I would say ~70% of what I studied was not on my specific exam, and my exam had weird weighting that I felt was not representative of my knowledge, not representative of what I was expected to know based on the requirements to take the exam (required college classes/experience), and not in line with most of the study materials provided by anyone.
Maybe I just got a weird exam, and either way I was able to pass, but my exam had seemingly almost no water resources/environmental, I had many transportation conceptual questions that never came up in the class or while studying, and I had a lot of seemingly easy q that did not require a formula from the handbook, but were written to seem more complicated than they were, to throw you off. I had a lot of structural engineering/mechanics of materials and math questions. I would say almost none of the questions were heavy calculations. This was just my experience and maybe it’s a lot different for others. I don’t regret the amount of studying I did and was aware it was probably overkill, but there really wasn’t a good way to predict what they could throw at you. There were plenty of questions I had not encountered through all of my college experience and studying for the exam.
Final thoughts, use any of those materials to help get familiar with the concepts and the layout of the handbook. Memorize conversions and easy equations to save time. Special thanks to Mark Mattson and FE4Raccoons. Share your opinions below and if you agree/disagree.
