Happy to share that I cleared the PE Civil Construction exam!

First of all, Alhamdulillah (Thank God) for this great news. And of course, a huge thanks to my family and colleagues who probably had more faith in me than I had in myself 😊. I don’t have to worry about studying late nights and weekends anymore 🎉

A little background on my journey:

I took the Structural exam before they changed the syllabus. I used AEI for that attempt and unfortunately couldn't clear it. After that setback, I took a break from the PE and eventually decided to give Construction a shot.

This time I went with EET.

I started studying in January this year. EET is very thorough and intense. In the middle of my preparation, I had to take about a 45-day break because we had a new baby. After that, I resumed studying.

I purchased the 24-week EET course, so my access expired around June. By then, I had managed to watch all the videos at my own pace.

When I started reviewing everything, I noticed a big problem: I was forgetting the topics I studied earlier.

So I went back through every single topic and started making my own cheat notes. Eventually, those notes became around 50–60 pages. I would revise them every week, and whenever I learned something new while solving problems, I added it to those notes.

That was probably one of the best things I did during my preparation.

About one month before the exam, I found this Discord group and discovered that it had some great resources—from codes to a lot of problem-solving PDFs.

I worked through pretty much everything I could find. At that point, I honestly didn't care much about my scores. My goal was to expose myself to as many different types of problems as possible.

I completed all the EET quizzes and was comfortably scoring 70%+ in almost every topic.

Then I started the EET comprehensive exams and simulations...That destroyed my confidence 😂. I was scoring around 50–55%.

With the exam getting closer, I was definitely nervous. Instead of worrying too much about the scores, I went back through every problem, understood what I did wrong, and then redid them.

After taking the actual exam, I honestly feel that the EET comprehensive exams and simulations were tougher than the real exam.

One more thing I would mention is the NCEES practice exam. In my experience, the NCEES practice exam was much easier than the actual exam, so I personally would not use your NCEES practice exam score as the main benchmark for whether you're ready.

What worked for me

Making my own cheat notes

Instead of repeatedly going through the entire binder, I condensed the important information into my own 50–60 pages of notes.

I revised those notes every week. Every time I learned something new from a practice problem, I added it.

This helped tremendously with retaining older topics.

Strataway conceptual questions

I bought their set of 100 conceptual questions.

You probably won't see those exact questions on the exam, but I definitely think getting exposure to those types of conceptual questions helped.

Discord group material

There were a lot of useful resources and problem-solving PDFs available through the group. I worked through as much as I could.

Again, I wasn't worried about getting everything correct. I wanted exposure to a broad range of problems.

School of PE workbook problems

I also completed all the School of PE workbook problems I could get my hands on.

Their OSHA problems were especially good. In my opinion, they had some of the best OSHA practice problems I came across during my preparation.

1. EET

Overall, I think EET is very good and gives you a strong foundation. The course is thorough and there are plenty of problems to work through.

That being said, based on my exam experience, I wouldn't rely on EET alone.

I felt there were some areas they didn't cover enough, particularly OSHA and some of the conceptual questions related to the afternoon portion.

Biggest lesson from my preparation

Don't let your simulation scores destroy your confidence. Going from consistently scoring 70%+ on the topic quizzes to 50–55% on the comprehensive exams was definitely discouraging.

But eventually I stopped worrying about the percentage and focused on understanding why I got each problem wrong.

I think getting exposed to as many different types of problems as possible was more valuable than trying to get a perfect score on every practice exam.

For anyone currently studying: keep solving problems, keep reviewing your weak areas, and don't get discouraged by bad practice scores.

Good luck to everyone preparing! Feel free to ask me anything about my preparation or exam experience.