PE Civil study guide
PE Civil · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) exam is NCEES's licensure examination that tests for a minimum level of competency in a particular engineering discipline. It is designed for engineers who have gained a minimum of four years of post-college work experience in their chosen discipline. NCEES offers more than 20 different PE exams; within civil, examinees select one of five disciplines - Construction, Geotechnical, Structural, Transportation, and Water Resources and Environmental - and the exam tests competency in that discipline. The exam is administered by computer at NCEES-approved test centers. The PE Civil study guide has 5 sections and about 1,481 words.
01Construction: Scheduling, Quantities, and Field Control
Construction questions reward a working command of the critical path method, earned value, quantity takeoff, and the physical realities of earthwork and concrete. Know how to build an activity-on-node network, compute early and late start/finish, and identify total float versus free float.
313 words, about 2 min02Geotechnical: Effective Stress, Strength, and Settlement
Geotechnical questions test effective stress, consolidation, shear strength, and bearing capacity. Always separate total stress from pore pressure: effective stress is total stress minus pore pressure.
311 words, about 2 min03Structural: Statics, Load Combinations, and Member Checks
Structural questions usually reduce to statics, load combinations, and member behavior. Draw the free-body diagram, solve reactions, then construct shear and moment diagrams.
293 words, about 1 min04Transportation: Curves, Sight Distance, and Traffic Flow
Transportation questions emphasize horizontal and vertical curves, sight distance, superelevation, and access management. For a circular horizontal curve, the degree of curve D (arc definition) and radius R are related by R = 5,729.58 / D.
282 words, about 1 min05Water Resources and Environmental: Runoff, Hydraulics, and Treatment
Water resources questions combine rainfall-runoff, open-channel flow, pipe hydraulics, and treatment. For small urban catchments, the rational method gives Q = CiA, with Q in cfs when i is in inches per hour and A is in acres; the 1.008 conversion is usually taken as 1.0.
282 words, about 1 min