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Originally Posted by manasecret
Was the FE tough? How much studying did you do? Did you take complete practice tests? The last test I took like that was even remotely similar was the SAT, which I did well on. Was it anything like that?
I'm an EE and I should take the FE. I'd be several years into my 5 years if I had just taken it when I graduated.
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http://www.ncees.org/exams/fundamentals/
The FE Exam was both tough and not tough..it's hard to explain. The first half was the general engineering section, which was 120 multiple choice questions. The second half was the part of your specific discipline, and it is 60 multiple choice questions. I took the Civil Engineering section, while you'll take the Electrical Engineering section. Each section is 4 hours long, and there was a little over an hour break between them for lunch and relaxing.
I didn't actually do any practice tests. I tried to study a little bit of each topic, but overall I didn't study much. The FE exam was on April 25th this year, which was the Saturday following Finals week for me at Pitt..which sucked, but I only had one final during finals week. The other finals were done the week before. Not to mention, on April 17th my long sickness started with that 103 fever that I mentioned earlier. It wasn't until after I took the FE exam that I found out that I had mono. With all of that on my plate, I really didn't have much time to study for the FE exam during April. I probably should have started studying earlier.
The best way to go about it is make sure you know the concepts for the topics that are on the exam, and just trust that you'll be able to remember the details. The problems aren't VERY hard, but some of them look like it at first. Some of them are there to trick you, but if you look at them hard enough you'll see where they try to trick you, but you can't spend too much time on each problem.
Here's a link to the material that's on the exam if you haven't already seen it.
http://www.ncees.org/exams/fundament...exam_specs.pdf
The first half has all the basic stuff that all engineers need to know such as Math, Physics, Chemistry, Statics, Dynamics, Strength of Materials, Material Properties, Prob Stat, Economics, Etc...
As I mentioned before, the second half has stuff geared toward your specific engineering major. I'm sure you'll know what to study for this better than I would know for you.
Like I said before, don't focus on the details. If you're studying calculus for instance, don't study SPECIFIC ways to take derivatives and integrals of strange functions. Just make sure you know how to take a derivative of a certain function, and then maybe make sure you know the rules for taking derivatives of trig functions, and the same goes for intergrals of trig functions. There are some other ones like the derivative and intregral of e and ln, that you might just want to make sure of..but don't try to memorize specifics of really really complicated derivatives and integrals. This test doesn't get too extraordinary.
To be honest, I figured I'd pass the test, but I knew that I couldn't just relax about it. I took it seriously, and used a lot of logic. I didn't stay on any problem for too long, and yes there were some that I had to guess on at the end, but it's better to get done what you know first, so do that, and don't waste time. If you have time to check it over, do so, but don't over do it because you might start second guessing yourself on problems that you were originally confident on.
Keep in mind that there are engineers who fail, but a good amount do pass. For instance, I knew that 92% of Civil Engineers at Pitt passed the FE exam on their first try, so that gave me a lot of confidence that I would do well, because I'm definitely in good standing in my class. You've had all of the material, or at least most of it, so you should be capable of getting answers right, so just trust yourself that you can do it.