How to Handle Subject Sections You Didn’t Study In School

Sculpture: OMG LOL (Detail) / Eyebeam Art + Technology Center Open Studios: Fall 2009 / 20091023.10D.55424.P1.L1 / SML

When you first started to study for the FE exam, you probably opened the study manual and looked at the topics covered. You saw subjects you expected like math, probability, statistics, engineering economics, etc.

However depending on your undergraduate curriculum, you probably saw some topics you didn’t even study. For example, if you’re an electrical engineering major, you probably shrieked in fear when you saw you’d be tested on subjects like material science and fluids. How are you supposed to pass an exam that has questions you’ve never even studied before?

Don’t fret. By all means, don’t waste time on these problems you don’t know.

Here are 2 reasons why:

  1. You only need to get 40 to 50% of all the questions correct to pass this exam. It’s easy to forget that the FE exam is a scaled test since throughout school life, you were trained that 70% was the magic number.
  2. You don’t have time. There are 4 hours to answer 120 questions in the morning session. That equals to 2 MINUTES per question. That is not a lot of time to spend scribbling on your scratch paper, punching numbers in your calculator, and flipping through the reference manual. You can’t afford to take longer than 2 minutes to solve each problem, especially if you’re not familiar with the subject.

Exam Day Action Plan

So what to do? Here’s what you should do on test day:

  1. Work all the problems in your primary areas of confidence first.
  2. Work the sections you know next best, and so forth.
  3. Finally, guess at the questions where you have no idea about the material.

Don’t waste time trying to work problems you will probably get wrong anyway. Save your time for those that you do have a chance on.

Test Day Tip

When you are finally getting to the general section problems you’re not sure on (after you’ve completed everything else you know of course), look at the discipline-specific sections of the NCEES Reference Handbook as well as the “general” section.

Sometimes the information you need to solve these “general” problems will be there. For example, say you are a civil engineer and you have an electrical circuit problem. Try looking in the electrical section in addition to the “general” section. It sounds obvious but too many test takers don’t think about doing this when in the heat of battle.

Wrap Up

Now if you have the time to review your unfamiliar subjects, it is definitely worthwhile to study them. Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and see a question from the practice problems or the problem will be simple enough for you to do. However during the exam, concentrate on the sections you know something about. You’ll have much greater success leveraging the subjects you do know and managing the ones you don’t.

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