PS Surveying study guide
PS Surveying · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Principles and Practice of Surveying (PS) exam is the NCEES examination that assesses whether a candidate can practice competently within the surveying profession. It is designed for surveyors who have already gained at least four years of professional experience and who are pursuing licensure through their state or territorial board. The PS Surveying study guide has 5 sections and about 1,586 words.
01Legal Principles and Professional Practice
Boundary questions are decided by rank, not by preference. The controlling order in retracement is: natural monuments (shorelines, rivers, trees), then artificial monuments called for in the record (iron pins, stone posts, set caps), then courses and distances, then area or quantity.
324 words, about 2 min02Measurement and Data Acquisition
Precision is repeatability - how tightly repeated observations cluster. Accuracy is closeness to truth.
337 words, about 2 min03Analysis and Computations
Convert each traverse course to latitude (ΔN = distance × cos azimuth) and departure (ΔE = distance × sin azimuth). Sum them; the vector sum is the closure error, and linear precision is closure distance divided by total traverse length.
324 words, about 2 min04Boundary and Land Surveying
Boundary surveying asks whether the record was realized on the ground. Federal PLSS questions are frequent: principal meridian and baseline; townships by tier (north/south) and range (east/west); 36 sections numbered from the northeast corner in a serpentine pattern, with Section 6 at the northwest corner and usually irregular.
294 words, about 1 min05Mapping, Platting, and Land Development
Know that NAD83 is a horizontal datum and NAVD88 a vertical one, and that GNSS delivers ellipsoidal heights while flood mapping and engineering design use orthometric heights; the difference is the geoid separation, on the order of −80 to −115 ft across the conterminous United States. State plane coordinates are zone-based, and grid distances differ from ground distances by the combined scale factor - multiply ground distance by the factor to get grid, which makes grid distances shorter within a zone's interior.
307 words, about 2 min