PPI FE Civil Review – A Comprehensive FE Civil Review Manual

Studying:This Review Manual was worth every penny. It follows with the NCEES reference manual really well and gave me everything I needed to be successful on the test. I am a current civil engineering major in my senior year. I bought this book a while back but was a little intimidated and so didn't even open it until a couple of months ago.Here is a not-so-well-known fact about the FE exam....you don't need to know everything. I printed off the list of topics and questions from the NCEES website and started with the Transportation and Geotechnical and then worked my way down to the lower priority questions. As a current student, I went from example to example in the book and tried to solve them. If I couldn't, I would try to learn it. If I couldn't learn it in 30 minutes, I moved on.Yes, some of the examples were longer than FE questions, but they were still helpful to me. In some sections, the RM gave an example for just about every equation in the NCEES reference manual and that was incredibly helpful. The act of working through the problems and identifying which equations needed unit conversions and which ones didn't was very useful, too. I did not study every section of the manual. I knew some topics like Mechanics of Materials it wouldn't matter how much I studied I would still do poorly.I spent a week going over the material I knew I could learn and then took off one day before the test.Test day:I spent my time on the questions I knew how to solve and made sure I was getting them right. Some of the questions were very similar to those in the RM (hint hint). This only makes sense because there are only so many problems you can ask with the equations in the reference manual. The ones I had no idea, I just guessed and moved on. I probably skipped and guessed about 25 questions (gasp!) and was unsure on about 10 more. But, 10 days later I got the result that I passed.You don't have to know it all. A 50% or 60% can get you a pass. If you're currently in school and have been paying attention at all to your classes, you don't need to study for an rediculous period of time either. Don't be intimidated. Learn the heavily weighted topics and then go for it: Get that EIT.Good luck!

First of, this book is a must have in preparing for the FE exam. What I liked about this reference is that it will highlight formulas that are in the FE reference manual (only electronic handbook allowed in taking the exam). What I liked is the problems solved showed where the formulas came from. I know people anticipate to see these type of problems in the FE, but don't do that approach. I just focused on how the formulas were used from the FE handbook and were applied to the problems (in other words, don't memorize the problems, that's were people make the mistake). My advice for FE takers, practice the problems using old NCEEs practice exams, purchase additional material, but the most important thing, get very familiar with the FE handbook on how formulas are applied and some cases, manipulate the formulas. I took the Civil FE exam in 2017 and passed, I also took an in-person FE review course at a local school.

The book is long and tedious to get through and it contains a bunch of information that you will probably never see on the exam. However, this is the best book to buy if you want to cover the entire range of topics you might see on the actual test without skipping anything. Each major topic is broken into several sub topics containing background information, key terms and concepts, and some practice problems to test how well you read over the material. Solutions are also provided with each problem. Altogether there are 62 sections starting with mathmatics and ending in ethics and professional practice.I studied this book for a good two and a half months before the exam reading about a chapter every other day (some days I would read multiple chapters to catch up if I was behind). I made sure to read each and every word and I think doing that helped me to pass the test. About 30% of the test is conceptual problems or definitions of terms and this book prepared me very well for those. This book only covers the fundamentals of each section, but understanding those fundamentals is all you need to pass the FE exam.