Course Objective: Learn the Concepts, Gain the Skills and Pass the Exam with Confidence
Understand the "why"
Gain confidence in each exam topic
Be familiar with the NCEES® Handbook
Know how to navigate the codebooks
Develop speed and avoid common mistakes with practice
Complete ALL course practice problems
Aim for 75% correct average on practice exams
Ask lots of questions!
Students that have passed average about 200-300 hours of study time. This of course, varies by person and experience. See the pass rate link in the next section for survey results.
Exam Scoring
There is no penalty for wrong answers, so if you are stuck on an answer, use your best judgement and process of elimination. Remember not to get bogged down by one question, move on and come back to it if you do not immediately know how to solve it.
Passing Score
The passing score is not published, since the exam is scaled through psychometric statistical calculations. However, based on past surveys, cut scores are usually around 57/80 correct.
Exam Scoring
The scoring is done by ranking a bank of questions based on difficulty, and comparing the scores against actual practicing professional engineers. One additional change to the CBT is that out of the 80 questions, 10 are test questions that will not be included in your final score. These questions are inserted to test their viability for future examinees. So really, your passing score will be out of 70, not 80.
CBT vs Paper/Pencil
The pass rate for first-time test takers of the CBT exam from January - June 2021 is 62%, which means 62% of the 1,548 first-time CBT test takers passed. Back in April 2020, when the test was paper-pencil, the pass rate was 50%. Paper-pencil tests from 2017-2019 averaged around a 55% first-time pass rate. The first CBT exam was in December 2020; from Dec 2020 - Jan 2021, 71% of the 643 test takers past. All this data implies that the pass rates for the Power CBT exam is still being normalized, but so far, the CBT appears to be more manageable than the paper-pencil.
NCEES® Exam Outline
The NCEES® Power PE Exam Syllabus defines the topics that will be tested and how many questions to expect per topic.
The EPG course and textbook cover all topics. Throughout your studying refer to this syllabus to make sure you are comfortable with all topics or flag the subjects you struggle in.
The exam is 80 problems, 8 hours. Approx. 6 minutes/problem. The exam is broken up in two sections with a break in between. You decide how to distribute the time between each section, but once you submit a section, you cannot go back to it.
Total Exam Time: 8 hours
(split between Section 1 & 2)
Total Appointment Time: 9 hours
Total Questions: 80 questions
(split between Section 1 & 2)
Intro: 10 minutes
First Section: ~40 questions (+/- few questions)
You decide when to stop the clock. Once you submit, you cannot go back.
Break Time: Max 50 minutes
Second Section: ~40 questions (+/- few questions)
Clock resumes, ends at 8 hours total test time. You cannot go back to the first section.
Computer Based Test (CBT) Interface
Split Screen: Side by Side view of Reference & Questions
Exam Day Resources: Provided as Searcahble PDFs. No outside resources.
NCEES® PE Electrical and Computer: Power Reference Handbook. Download free on MyNCEES.com
NCEES® has a list of calculators that are allowed into the exam. We recommend the TI-36XPro. The Casio FX-991EX is also a good model. See the links for calculator manuals.
At a minimum, you should be familiar how to use the following functions. This will be key for improving your speed and minimizing mistakes.
Converting between polar and rectangular
Complex Calculations: using a mix of polar and rectangular
Convert between degrees and radians
Using the solve function
NCEES® Examinee Guide
For more information about the exam, review the NCEES® Examinee Guide
