The California PE Exam: Overview

I’ve posted my opinions about the PE exam in engineering forums in the past, so I felt it might be useful to talk about it here. For those of you not familiar with the California PE Exam, it stands for “Professional Engineer” and it is a licensing exam that some engineers need. I say “some” because it is really only necessary for engineers who need their designs approved by the state—mostly civil, electrical, and mechanical engineers who design buildings and other structures. For example, aerospace engineers don’t really need a PE license. But if they get it, they get to stamp and sign drawings with an official stamp. Yay! Our industry is so fun!

Many engineers struggle with the electrical PE exam. It’s a pretty long exam; about 8 hours with two 40 question sections. A lot of people take the exam many times before they pass, and the experience can be excruciating (from what I can imagine). Now, it just so happens that I am a very good test-taker. I don’t say that to brag (well, not so much). I want to give away the secret to pass this test. My tips here are specific to the Electrical Engineering PE exam, but can probably be applied to other PE exams, and perhaps can even be extended to any standardized test.

First of all, the mistake most people make is that they make the test harder than it is. This is because most of the material to study from is terrible, and when you have bad material, the test seems harder. I searched pretty extensively for review materials. There isn’t much available. The book that everyone and their mother uses, the Electrical Engineering Manual for the PE Exam by Camara [I initially had Yarbrough here; it doesn't matter, this criticism applies to all the editions], is pretty much worthless in my opinion. It doesn’t really help you pass the exam at all. Let me give you my background. My college degree was in Bioengineering, and I only took one introductory EE class. Fortunately, like I said, I’m a good test-taker and I recognize good study material when I see it. You see, study material is like a teacher; a bad teacher makes learning a subject very hard, and a good teacher is able to take something complex and make it seem easy to the student. I worked as an electrical engineering for about one year, and I passed the EE PE on my first shot, after studying for a little over a month. The secret for me was that my friend gave me a really useful, applicable book that is unfortunately discontinued for the past 15 years almost. The author was this guy, Chelapati. The book was good because the problems and discussions were tailored for the PE test (power) and not just EE in general, like most study material. Now, because the book is so old, the practice problems are in the old format of the PE test (essay answers) rather than multiple choice. But it doesn’t matter because the content is still relevant. I highly recommend this book, but it will be impossible to find. Aren’t I a bastard? If you contact me discreetly, I may be able to help you locate a copy.

Also, the classes are not very useful either, and I refused to take one. All the classes do is force you to study if you don’t have the discipline. The instructors are usually not very good, and the material you get from the class is usually a waste (unless it’s stuff like this Chelpati book). The instructors are normally from the industry, and will most probably have an accent that is difficult to understand. And even if you do understand them, they are engineers, which means they are probably not the best teachers in the world. If you find that insulting, too bad, because it’s the truth. My coworker took a class, and he swears it helped him, but it didn’t really. He’s too unmotivated to study on his own and he needed the class to force him to spend time doing something academic. Also, he already has an EE major, so the content was just review for him, he just needed to sit down and remember some stuff he had forgotten. Meaning he didn’t have to really learn new material. It’s easy to recall something you already knew; it’s a totally different thing to learn something from scratch, which is magnitudes more difficult (which is what I had to do). I emphasize this point because I want to point out that it wasn’t the class or the teacher that helped, it was just the fact the situation forced him to spend time remembering what he already knew.

Back to the Reference Manual book that everyone gets—it has become the standard for this exam. The main problem with it is that it goes into way too much detail about stuff you don’t need to know for the PE. 70% of the PE questions cannot be answered using that book alone. It’s a good reference, but that’s it. Again, it’s more of a help to people who already know the material and just need it to jog their memory. I found that the book is overkill for the morning section (general electrical engineering questions), and not detailed enough for the afternoon section (specialty questions—most people pick Power). I learned my lesson with the Mechanical Engineering PE exam, which uses an analogous book (same company). I studied with just that book for 3 months, because I didn’t know what the exam was like, and during the actual test, I felt like I had studied too much for the general section, and not nearly enough for the specialty section. I still passed, but if I did the same for the Electrical PE, I don’t think I would have passed because I took many more mechanical engineering classes in college and I was already familiar with some of the content.

The best thing to study with, by far, is a real-life past exam. Unfortunately, there is only one available from NCEES. There are other practice tests out there (Kaplan, 101 practice problems, 6-minute problems, etc.). These books aren’t that great either. I mean, they’ll help you learn stuff about electrical engineering, but they won’t really help you pass the test. That’s the goal here. I hate to be cynical (actually, I love it), but the goal is to pass the test, not to become a great engineer. So, most of the books out there, in an attempt to be comprehensive and not leave anything out, become a huge waste of time and non-productive.