Land Surveying Practice and Professional Competency (Delaware)
This domain tests whether you can practice lawfully and competently as a licensed Professional Land Surveyor in Delaware: the licensure path, seal and signature duties, standards of care, boundary-evidence reasoning, and the state's distinctive description conventions.
Licensure and professional conduct
Delaware Code Title 24, Chapter 27 governs the title "Professional Land Surveyor" and is administered by the Board of Registration for Professional Land Surveyors within the Division of Professional Regulation. The ladder runs Land Surveyor Intern (NCEES Fundamentals of Surveying passed) to Professional Land Surveyor (NCEES Principles and Practice of Surveying plus Board-accepted experience). Only a licensee may sign, seal and certify plats, descriptions and reports, and the licensee must be in responsible charge of the work sealed. Grounds for discipline include incompetence, negligence, misrepresentation and unlicensed practice.
Boundary evidence hierarchy
Rank evidence from strongest to weakest: natural monuments (watercourses, ancient trees, original banks); artificial monuments set by the original survey and the calls to them; then courses and distances; then area and quantity. A monument called for generally controls a conflicting distance. Junior deeds yield to senior rights, and a call for an adjoiner's line may control over a recited distance.
Delaware conventions
There is no PLSS grid in Delaware. Descriptions are metes and bounds rooted in Penn-era warrants and surveys, still located within the state's "hundreds" (for example, Appoquinimink Hundred) and often recited with perches (16.5 ft) and roods. Deeds are recorded with the Recorder of Deeds for New Castle, Kent or Sussex County. Coordinate work uses the single Delaware State Plane zone, NAD 83, in U.S. survey feet.
Worked example
A 1901 deed conveys "5 acres, 2 roods and 12 perches." Convert everything: 1 perch = 16.5 ft, so 1 square perch = 272.25 sq ft; 1 rood = 1/4 acre = 10,890 sq ft; 1 acre = 43,560 sq ft. Area = 5(43,560) + 2(10,890) + 12(272.25) = 217,800 + 21,780 + 3,267 = 242,847 sq ft, or 5.575 acres. Compare with your computed traverse area; a material difference is a research flag, never authority to move a monument, because area is the weakest call and "more or less" makes it non-controlling.
Traps that cost marks
Assuming recited acreage controls the boundary; mixing U.S. survey feet with international feet in State Plane work; sealing a plat prepared by unqualified staff outside your responsible charge; treating a hundred line or a tax-map line as a property line; and applying PLSS aliquot language to Delaware land.