FE Civil (Passed) - International Student
Hi all, I recently just passed the FE exam on my first attempt. As with most other people on here, this subreddit has proved to be a very useful resource for me and so I thought it’s only fair I give something back by sharing my experience particularly given that I did not complete my degree in the USA.
Background:
Firstly some info on me. I completed by Bachelors in Civil Engineering in Australia at the end of 2015 and have since been working at an global engineering consultancy in land development. I decided to take my exam in New York as the approval process was quite simple. All I had to do was submit my bachelors transcript and the degree award itself. The state board then took about a month to approve my degree as equivalent to an ABET accredited one from the USA. After doing so I scheduled my exam in March so that I was able to take the test in August.
FE Prep:
Having scheduled my exam in March, I had a window of around 4 months to study. Given that I am working full time, I assumed (worst case) that I would not study after work at all and so the only study time I would get would be on the weekends. I began by looking at the specifications and separating the topics from strongest to weakest and made a program using MS Project (although admittedly I did deviate from this towards the end). https://puu.sh/xi7IY/4027695ab9.png
The majority of the content I learned during my undergrad overlapped with the specifications. However, being a year and a half out of school I needed a refresher and I started going through the Coursera website which I highly recommend to all: https://www.coursera.org/learn/fe-exam/home/welcome
In addition to coursera I also viewed several videos from this youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGv3KG_qIWQuIZEH-YGpBUw/videos
Once I had covered all the theory, I began going through as many questions as I could from the 3rd edition of Lindeburg’s FE Review Manual. I supplemented these questions with questions I found online from college FE review courses. Next, I ordered the NCEES sample exam which I also recommend to all. I sat this exam in slightly more strict conditions. In the actual exam you have about 3 minutes per question, I gave myself 2 minutes. I scored about 55% on this exam. This was partially due to silly mistakes such as units being incorrect (I am accustomed to the metric system) and also because I blind guessed several major topics including geotech and environmental. So with 3 weeks to go before the actual exam I had my work cut out for me, I re-visited topics I was weak at and I ONLY learnt how to do the questions in the sample exam for topics which I had blind guessed.
All along I had tracked my progress using a simple excel spreadsheet shown here: https://puu.sh/xi8gL/9bcda40943.png
Additionally, I had written questions I thought were particularly important/unique one seperate sheets of paper and reviewed them a week out from the exam and highlighted/noted why I thought they were important.
FE Exam Day:
Contrary to what a lot of people do, I actually studied on the morning of my exam. However, it was nothing too intense I simply went through the notes I made of formulas I needed to memorise (yes, there are some albeit very minimal) and the notes of the questions I separated out.
My exam had 54 questions in the first part and 56 in the second. I got through section one with around 3 hours to go. In between the two sections you are allowed a 25 minute break, I only used 10 and got back into it as I did not want to lose the flow. I walked out of the exam not completely satisfied and the week between taking the exam and the results being released, I had mentally prepared myself for a fail.
My Advice:
When it comes to any exam you often have the difficulty of the questions to deal with or the clock or both. With the FE exam I felt the questions were relatively straight forward however it is time that you are working against so make sure you pace yourself as best as possible throughout the whole exam.
There is a lot of content to cover in preparation for this exam so ensure you have a strong grasp on the majority of the topics and you have a fair understanding of the remainder of the topics. In the Civil exam there are 18 topics, I had a strong grasp on about 13 of the topics and the remaining 5 I had a general idea of how to solve some questions.
Goodluck! Feel free to ask me any questions :)