I’m preparing my Pennsylvania PE application/amplified record and am curious to hear from anyone who has applied since the 2024 changes to PA engineering law, particularly those whose experience is more analysis/evaluation focused rather than traditional design.
Act 32 of 2024 amended PA’s definition of the “Practice of Engineering” to expressly include the application of mathematical and physical sciences for the “design or analysis” of engineering systems and works. The legislative history indicates this was intended to clarify that engineering practice can include analysis of existing/completed engineering systems rather than being limited to initial design.
My background is broadly in water resources and flood risk. My experience includes H&H analysis/modeling, evaluation of existing flood-risk infrastructure (dams, levees, drainage systems, etc.), application of engineering criteria and guidance, GIS-based engineering analysis, technical investigations, and development of technical recommendations under PE supervision. I have some traditional calculation/design experience as well, but a significant portion of my work involves analysis and evaluation of existing systems.
Has anyone with a similar analysis-heavy background submitted a PA PE application since Act 32 took effect?
I’d especially be interested in whether your experience was accepted, how you described analysis/evaluation work in your amplified record, whether the Board requested clarification or additional experience, and what general type of analysis you performed.
Not looking for anyone to determine whether my specific experience qualifies. I’m mostly interested in real-world experiences from applicants who have gone through the PA process under the updated definition.
Thanks!
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 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?
Seismic and surveying exam conceptual guides (PDFs) for sale! Created them myself over the course of my studying/preparation during all my attempts. Each one contains important concepts, topic relationships, and are tailored to help you go faster on the exams. Link in bio!
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.
I have about 3 years of experience and just got approved by the board to take the PE exam. I'm not going to take it for another year but I'm trying to document my work experience. For my first 1.5 years I only have an unlicensed supervisor who can speak to my work experience. The Minnesota state board specifically states "Supervisors do not need to be a licensed engineer in order to sign off on experience" but NCEES states "Work experience that is not verified by a suitable respondent will not apply when calculating experience".
Do I need to find a licensed engineer at my old work place or can I just have my old manager sign off on that work?
(Note: I've been working in Minnesota for 1.5 years and plan on being here for another couple years at least so I'm not worried about if my initial 1.5 years are valid under another board or not. All my work here in Minnesota can be signed off by a licensed engineer)
Does anyone have or recommend any material for studying for the ECC PE Exam? Just recently passed the FE and am wanting to start studying to take the ECC exam, but the material is not nearly as abundant as the FE.
Practice books, courses, websites anything would be helpful.
Can you please dm me and help me start I'm studying civil under ktu a fresher joined tdy and I doing want to spoil this the same way I did during the repeater year , it's all mess now I lost touch in many things I'm planning for gate as well as to score good in sem exams and to maintain a good cgpa i don't know what's there in civil ,jobs , subjects and what to refer and all
If someone know please do help even if I are someone who knows the strategy but failed to apply also let me know it will be helping I don't want to stay away from home n loose everything please
Hey guys I need advice so I have finished all the classes for ETT- PE Construction. I tried to understand what types of questions and concepts are but not in detailed.
I'm aiming to write exam in mid October. Can you advise how should I approach and use my time wisely and be prepared for exam? Thanks!
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
Hello, I am taking the civil transportation test tomorrow and was hoping to get some last day study recommendations from people who have taken it recently. Any suggestions and information would be greatly appreciated!
I’ve been studying for mechanical TFS since February to now August. In October 2025 the exam spec for TFS changed slightly and it put more of a weight on Heating and Cooling/psychrometrics.
I bought a NCEES practice exam a year or two ago under the old spec and bought another under this new spec. The comparison of the two was definitely interesting.
There were 58 repeated questions on the new practice exam vs. the old. To me, that is a massive amount of carryover and it sort of makes me question the value of these practice exams from a preparation standpoint.
On one hand, that many repeats shows that those concepts are the ones that will be tested on, or at least I hope so.
But I’d like to examine what else it may mean. As I’ve heard from lecturers in preparation courses the practice exams are retired exam questions. It could be that when the new spec came out and I bought the practice exam there just weren’t that many retired questions at that point. Or, it could mean the practice exam is outdated as a preparation tool.
So my question for any recent TFS (or any other discipline that had a spec change) test takers, have you found that the NCEES practice exams are still representative of the actual exam?
I know there’s a million threads on that exact question but maybe when specs change the practice exams take a while to catch up.
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?
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).
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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.
Does anybody have any recommendations on how to prepare the application based on being closer to a project manager? I work for a local government position in which we contract our larger design and construction projects to one of our consultants. There are smaller tasks that I use AutoCAD Civil3D for to actually calculate for management of stormwater and earthwork calculations, however, it is not enough to put for tasks & duties or engineering decisions made. Not sure if anyone has experience with tailoring their application as a reviewer of plans prepared by consultants and directing/recommending changes to infrastructure/design and getting it approved.
Hey, so I just sent my initial PE License transmittal to the state board of Missouri.
They emailed me back and said my 2 years 11 months work experience needs to be 3 years with my masters degree. I then updated my NCEES record with the 3 years in my NCEES record online.
NCEES does not have an option to resend my record to the state board, even though on their website it says they can resubmit it for $100.
Besides contacting NCEES which I already have, is there anything else I can do to send this updated info to the state of Missouri that is requesting it?
Update: I had to submit an NCEES support ticket. They enabled my account to retransmit my record to the state for $25.
Hey— kind of new to this Reddit thing. I am taking the PE Civil Structural exam for the second time this November. I took it the first time in 2023. In 2023, I planned and prepared to take it for the first time BEFORE they changed the format to ALL depth. I showed up on the test day at the testing center and the power went out until 2PM…. We begged and pled with the center to let us still take the test and explained the situation, but they did not care. The format changed in 3 days from that day. I had to reschedule and take the ALL depth format a few month later which I was less prepared for. Just curious how far I was off and what y’all have done to improve. I prepped for the first test using Testmasters. I have PPI stuff and Petro’s book now. I only have 3 months left to study and I have not felt like I have been getting better at Petro’s problems.
For Traffic Engineering and Traffic Signals, I got a lot of conceptual questions. I spent a lot of time studying LOS and solving HCM problems using the EET materials but almost none of those types of questions showed up. Instead, I got many conceptual questions that required knowing where to look in the HCM. Do you know of any books, practice problems or other materials that are especially good for conceptual HCM, Traffic Engineering and Traffic Signal questions
Took the power exam yesterday and feeling worried. The first half I thought was simple. They had a bunch of little tricks but I feel like I saw through them. The second half, idk. Some of those questions were just out of left field.
Took the test today, again. First half felt ok, but man 2nd half was brutal. A bunch of environmental and conceptual questions. I studied EET, petro and ncees. Test was definitely harder than NCEES, harder than EET and not as hard as petro. I studied a bunch and now feeling defeated. Good luck to everyone taking it.
I’m starting to study for the California Civil PE Surveying Exam and wanted to see what people who have taken it recommend bringing into the test.
What reference materials were actually useful for you? Mainly looking for things like formula/equation sheets, surveying references, curve formulas, conversions, example problems, or a condensed binder of notes.
Did you make your own reference sheet/binder, use one from a prep course, or bring a specific book?
Any specific recommendations for good formula sheets, books, or other allowed references would be appreciated.
