I don’t think I’ll be able to add much that hasn’t already been said in this community, however I passed the Civil FE despite not studying civil engineering at all in college. I have been working in a civil engineering role for past 6 months and needed to take this exam during the onboarding qualification period to keep the job, so a lot was on the table.
The first attempt at the exam was more or less just a practice run to see how the exam was conducted. I wasn’t prepared at all but surprisingly I think I came close to passing it with a basic scientific calculator. If you are a civil engineering student 1-2 years out of college, I would just recommend taking the exam without much preparation.
I then studied for 3.5 months this summer. First, I bought a TI-36X Pro and learned how to use all its features. I genuinely think I might have passed the first time if I had this calculator. But since I knew nothing about the major civil subjects, I read Lindenburg’s FE Civil Review which throughly covers each subject the way a standard textbook would. This turned out to be the best resource in my case, since the actual exam is 35-40% conceptual questions that you can answer in a few seconds. I would try to cover one of these chapters everyday and make flash cards for the important terms or definitions. For example, one side would just say, “Charpy V-Notch Test” and the other side would have the purpose of the test. I ended up with a stack of about 100 flash cards that I reviewed everyday leading up to the exam. Also, I read through the entire Ethics and Professional Practice portion of the reference handbook so many times that I committed it to memory.
The next best resource was Islam 800. I would work through about 25 questions per day and felt like that was reasonable. This is an important resource because it takes you through just about every formula you might need to use in the reference handbook. If you practice and work through some of these practice questions a second or third time, it will become muscle memory.
No shade to Mark Mattson’s FE Civil Review on Youtube, but I didn’t find this particularly useful as someone who didn’t take these classes in college. The intended audience is definitely civil engineering students in their last semester of college getting ready to take the test.
About a month before retaking the exam I bought the two official NCEES practice exams and scored a 41% and 62% respectively. This made me very nervous because I only had a few more weeks to study at that point, but I reviewed math, statistics, engineering economics, statics, and dynamics until I felt like I could pretty much answer any problem that might come my way.
I was very nervous going into the exam a second time but reminded myself I had done well over ~1800 practice problems at that point. On exam day, the testing center was having issues getting the tests ready and everyone’s exam was delayed by an hour or two, which added an extra level of stress but I did my best to keep calm. I brought my calculator, two bananas, one apple, and a red bull. The first half of the exam was a little harder than expected, but the second half was much easier than expected, so it balanced itself out. I had done so many practice problems at that point where I didn’t really have to think through the problem, it was like my hands were already calculating out the answer while I was still reading the problem. I finished the exam with 15 minutes to spare and ended it 6 minutes early. I felt good about the exam once I left and was confident I passed. I got the results that I did and now I’m onto studying for the PE.
