How to cram for Fundementals of Engineering (FE) Exam?

April 24, 2009 11:34 AM

I signed up to take the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam tomorrow morning in Tennessee. For no real reason, I haven't been preparing and just realized this is an 8 hour exam. How do I pass?

I go to a top university in Tennessee and am hoping my coursework has prepared me enough to pass. Am I being naive?

I am a computer engineering student and will take the 'Electrical' test for the second half of the exam. The first half is general engineering. How can I best cram for this? Is it a lost cause?

I would love some advice! For what it's worth, I am taking the exam as a junior so if I do fail and want to take it again I can.

Thanks!

posted by jdlugo to education (8 comments total)

Don't bother cramming - it is too late. I believe you are still allowed to bring notebooks and reference material. As long as that is in order, you could salvage something out of it. The saving grace is that the exam is multiple choice so as long as you can make inspired guesses, you could pass. Good luck!
posted by JJ86 at 11:42 AM on April 24

I took the test in Pennsylvania three years ago. Eight hours is a miserable amount of time to be stuck in a convention center with a couple hundred engineering students scribbling away at desks. :-P I don't even remember how much I prepared for it, but I know I didn't go crazy studying. The general engineering section is murder -- there will be question upon question from the mechanical, chemical, geological, etc. fields that you'll have no possible way of knowing how to answer correctly. Just make educated guesses. Remember that the percentage you need correct in order to pass is exceedingly low. I can't imagine I got better than a 60% on the whole exam, yet I still passed.
posted by Nothlit at 11:59 AM on April 24

From what I remember, you aren't allowed anything more than a calculator, and the testing facility provides the rest. They provide a reference booklet. If you can get your hands on a copy, I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with the locations of basic formulas to solve engineering problems, as you can spend a lot of time flipping aimlessly looking for information.

That being said, the general engineering section is basically just homework problems from Statics, Thermo, Dynamics, Circuits, and Fluids. If you took (any/all of) these courses, that will help you substantially in terms of passing. If you haven't, no amount of cramming will help you now, as it's simply too much information to absorb. IIRC, I think the necessary scaled scored to pass is 70, which equates to getting something like 50% or so of the questions correct, so not outside the realm of serendipity.

For what it's worth, all of my friends and I passed the FE with maybe 3 or 4 hours of preparation. However, we came from a mechanical engineering background, which requires taking all of the traditional engineering sciences.
posted by conradjones at 12:49 PM on April 24

The most important tool for passing the general portion of the exam is the equation booklet that is provided. You can download a PDF version for free here. Literally every question on the general portion has a correlated equation somewhere in that booklet - the trick is to find it quickly enough. Cram that and you should have no problem passing the FE test.

When I took the test several years ago, the electrical portion was 95% op-amps. I don't know if they mix it up or what.
posted by muddgirl at 12:56 PM on April 24

I didn't study a lick (I didn't have to pass it since Comp Eng/Comp Sci doesn't have a certification, but yet the univ. required me to take it to get my diploma) and I was able to pass it in 2004 in five and a half hours - 2.5 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. I took the "general" part of the exam for both parts, as I never was good with op-amps. And I had never had the general statics/dynamics/fluids classes so some of the stuff was just rough analysis/intuition.

The afternoon was fewer questions but more work per question. If I recall correctly, many of the multiple choice answers were of the following pattern: 50 m/s^2, 5 m/s^2, 0.5m/s^2 and 0.05m/s^2. So I didn't have to do the math, just figure out the correct order of magnitude for the answer and the rest of the work was done for me. Or if they weren't of that form, you'd still have a fairly narrow variation of numbers: 10N, 8N, 1N, .8N.
posted by SirOmega at 1:20 PM on April 24

If you're going to cram (and not that it would help), spend your time with the equation book they'll give you during the exam.

If you're only going to be strong on one part of the test, you should still be okay. I took the Civil afternoon portion, having only focused my classes on transportation design. When I found that the civil portion was mostly structures and foundations, I did the 3 geometrics questions, and pretty much ABBA'd the rest.

hwyengr, P.E.
posted by hwyengr at 2:20 PM on April 24

To be clear upon how little cramming would likely help you in the next day, I basically spent 3-4 hours every Thursday for a month or two just going over all of the material. And this included 'homework' where I would work problem sets outside of the sessions. To be fair, I hadn't taken dynamics, thermo, fluids, or anything related to three-phase power so I needed the crash course. Look over the booklet if you can as it is quite large and knowing where to look for stuff will be helpful.
posted by Green With You at 2:51 PM on April 24

I spent the afternoon and evening before cramming... and I passed just fine. None of this stuff is really all that complicated, you just have to find the right equations in the book. Good luck.
posted by yggdrasil at 12:58 PM on April 25