I studied for months only to fail my first attempt. I was told that I needed it by the 25th or I would lose my position. I took it pretty last second and finally passed.

I feel like I can finally breathe. The weight on my shoulders was unreal.

Hey guys,

I took the exam last week, and ended up getting my passing result today!

As I just came out of college, a lot of the content was still clear. Digital Logic was actually one of my best subjects in college, so having to prioritize that less helped a huge amount. I hadn’t had much prior power experience in the past, but it was definitely a concept that was built in after multiple practice problems.

For my routine, I worked full time directly after school. I’d study 1-2 hours on the weekdays, and around 4 each day of the weekend.

I used PrepFE, the Lindenbaug book, and the official practice exams you can purchase from the NCEES.

What I did wrong: I started PrepFE first, which just gave me practice problems that I stared at heavily confused. The difficulty on a lot of those questions are definitely more tougher than the questions I saw last week. The Lindenbaug textbook is also just a waste of money/time, way too difficult and sophisticated.

What I did right: Grinded each concept of every question in the practice exams. Whatever I didn’t understand, I’d scan to AI for understanding/similar practice problems to solve. Claude was a huge help in tutoring. After grasping the content from the official practice exams, I began to latch away at tons of PrepFE problems.

WORK the practice exams until you can’t anymore. DON’T memorize answers, rather memorize how to work various concepts.

Sacrificing smaller concepts is okay, but don’t let it be Economics, probability, electromagnetics. Those are give me questions once you refer to the handbook and learn how the questions look. Also don’t sacrifice the big 4: mathematics, circuit analysis, digital logic, or power systems; just way too risky.

Feel free to ask questions, would love to help all aspiring exam takers!

This was my second attempt and i just failed. I was unable to finish so i left the last 10 empty. Any advice? Do i just get one more try until i cant take for a year? I would appreciate any study advice if possible. Thank you in advance.

Passed after studying for a month (mainly weekends). I graduated in December 2025 so a good chunk of the content was still pretty fresh. Let me know if you have any questions or DM me for advice! Happy to help!

I’ve been sweating bullets these past few days waiting for my results, but now I can say I passed the CIVIL FE as a MECE. My study resources were:

- TestMasters study guide
- Mark Mattson videos
- Vol 1 and Vol 2 of the NCEES practice exam

I studied the TestMasters guide 8-10 hours every weekend over the course of 4 months. And an accelerated study of the MM videos and NCEES practice exam a week and a half prior to exam date.

The Mark Mattson videos were closer in scope and format to what my problems were on the exam, I only watched the videos that were more civil based than general engineering based. The practice exam helped me practice the test taking methods to time myself appropriately.

The TestMasters was good for teaching myself the material since a lot of the material I was looking at I was learning for the first time. But if you already have a background in Civil Engineering I would invest my time into doing more practice problems similar to the exam.

Biggest advice, become familiar with the formula sheet. You do not want to be wasting time getting familiar with it on exam day, they can ask anything! I got some questions relating to mechanical deformation due to heat which is not what I expected going based off of anything that I studied. Luckily the background in MECE helped with those types of problems.

After 8 years out of college, I’m happy to share that I passed the FE Civil exam!

The resources that helped me the most were:

• Islam 800 Problems
• NCEES Practice Exams
• Mark Mattson (MM) videos

A big thank you to everyone in this group. Reading your experiences, tips, and encouragement throughout my preparation made a real difference.

If you're still preparing, keep going—you can absolutely do it. Good luck to everyone taking the exam!

I am happy to share that I passed my FE Electrical exam on my first attempt. I am an international graduate from India, and after being away from school for almost 15 years while working a labour job for the last 4–5 years, I decided to restart my engineering journey. I completed Wasim Asghar's full FE Electrical course and solved all 700 problems from Study Guide 3. His teaching style, concept explanations, and exam-focused approach gave me the confidence to succeed. When I entered the exam, I felt well prepared because of the strong foundation built through the course. Thank you to this community and Wasim for the support!

Just finished my 3rd year of uni this last may and just passed the FE mech.

I only studied on the weekends for 2 months using Prep FE and the practice exam from NCEES.

Imo I think I may have overstudied as I found the FE Exam pretty easy ( maybe I got an easy version), but let me know if you have any questions.

I studied few weeks for my FE ECE exam. It’s been several year out of college. I was sad to see the result. I did prepare for the exam but while giving exam I realized the questions were a lot harder than I anticipated. Need some advice and motivation how to tackle this. I gave my exam last week (2nd week of July), when will I be eligible for the second attempt?

I Passed the FE exam first attempt and here is my full experience:

I am in my senior year of Mechanical engineering with only one semester left so I basically have finished all the core ME courses and everything is still fresh in my mind. I am an average ME student who just puts in the effort the week of any school exam. For the FE, I started preparing about 2 months before the test. I would study everyday for 3-5 on weekdays, and 8-10 on weekends.

Main source of study: Islam FE mechanical (This is a 750 questions book that covers all the chapters and in good order and sequence which will help you connect everything together as the questions will just build up on the previous questions)

Secondary Source of study: FE interactive website ($20 subscription I only recommend it in the last month of studying) - (This is a good source for extra daily practice questions, I recommend utilizing this source only after you have gone through most chapters from the Islam 750 book and just need the extra FE style questions practice)

Third source of study: Practice Exams. I Purchased the two practice exams from NCEES website, and I had couple more old practice exams. Started with those practice exams about a week or two from the exam date and understood all the questions which was very helpful on the exam day.

Exam day: I started going through the test one question after the another, and I think I flagged about 50 questions in total. My specific exam was so much harder than the practice exams or any other kind of practice I had in general. I had to guess on so many problems and when I left from the exam I felt like I was hit by a truck. I genuinely thought I failed the test and that I have to take it again. But I guess if you knew at least 40-50 questions on the test (which I did) then the rest will be taken care of by guessing. you would just need 15-20 lucky guesses to secure 60 correct questions which I personally believe is the passing score (I might be wrong, but I have never seen anyone with 60% or more failing the test).

My advice: On the exam, don't waste time getting stuck on one problem, solve what you know, flag what you don't know, by the end go back to the flagged ones and make an educated guess. If you have no idea at all then pick a letter and stick to it for consistency. For me I picked the letter B for any of the questions that I had absolutely no idea how to solve. That's what worked for me and I hope this helps those preparing to take theirs.

If anyone is signing up, please use my referral link, I need more months to study, tia!! :))

So I just got my results, passed on my first attempt.
Only studied using the NCEES practice exams.
Got super familiar with the reference book and utilized that for almost everything.
Did a total of about 7-8 hrs of effective studying the 4 days leading up to exam.

Wouldn't recommend this strategy unless you very recently graduated. It cut my average question response time down by over 2 minutes and allowed me to use that extra time to go over questions I wasn't as confident on.

I would highly highly recommend to get familiar with the reference book.
Flagged questions where I wasnt able to answer in under 1 minute and circled back at the end of each module.
On questions where I had no idea what to do, I never guessed the highest number, or the lowest, went with gut on determining between those too.
Graduated in early may and started work late may, took exam on an off day.

I’m looking for advice on returning to electrical engineering and preparing for the FE Electrical and Computer exam.

I earned a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering in Canada about 10 years ago. After graduating, I moved into management consulting, data analytics, and business intelligence rather than traditional electrical engineering work. I’m now living in the United States and seriously considering returning to the electrical field.

I enjoyed electrical engineering and believe there may be a stronger long-term future in areas such as power systems, utilities, controls, automation, renewable energy, infrastructure, or related technical work.

Since I have been away from most core electrical engineering subjects for nearly a decade. I would appreciate advice from anyone who has returned to engineering after a long gap or taken the FE exam several years after graduating.

Sadly failed my FE, I didn't give myself enough time to really study before going into the FE (life has been insane). Being even a couple years out of school has really made studying and exam taking almost foreign to me. Any recommendations for courses or sources? I'm really leaning towards getting into a live course, I think Id be able to pace myself better that way.

I was studying with EETs binder that a friend lovingly gave me, and that's a great resource! Let me know what worked for you!

For those who have taken the FE Civil multiple times: did you feel like some attempts were easier or harder than others?
I’m honestly more nervous about my second attempt than my first 😭 What did you study, what resources did you use, and how many hours did you study? And how long after did you schedule another attempt. Any advice for preparing and dealing with exam anxiety would be greatly appreciated!

I am taking the FE civil exam on August 14th for the second time. (First attempt was May 15th and I failed with a score of 53%). I have not been able to study much since then and I noticed it was $50 to reschedule it. Is it worth rescheduling? Or should I take it then

Here is my referral code! If you use it to sign up for PrepFE, we each get a free extra month of access.
https://www.prepfe.com/?referral_token=a6fd3b41-29aa-4e7e-b453-5db722f3f6ef

I finished the 1st half of FE Mechanical about 2h ago. Took the break and cant get back to the 2nd half because of a “national outage”.

My 25min break turned into 2h. They don’t know if I will be able to get back in. This sucks

Fun fact. I got a statics question straight from the NCEES Vol1. I think even the same numbers lol.

**UPDATE**. After quite a bit of waiting they solved it. Overall the exam felt more familiar than the practice tests I took. (Vol1, 2020, 2017). Hoping for the best.

I took the exam this morning. It wasn’t too bad and I think I passed. None of the questions were really curveballs or anything unexpected. I would say the first half of the exam was a lot easier than the second half. While studying I would make sure to do a lot of practice problems in structures, geotech, and fluids to be really comfortable with those problems. The civil engineering section of the reference handbook is only 50 or so pages so I recommend reading that in full before the exam to be familiar with all of the formulas. Being able to find stuff in that section saved me a lot of time today. It’s probably not worth reading every page anywhere else in the reference manual. The manual is searchable after all.

I studied for a total of 77.5 hours. I kept a spreadsheet to track my hours which was helpful overall in keeping everything organized. What I did seemed very effective and I would recommend it to anyone else.

I started by watching all of the Mark Mattson videos, pausing to do all the problems on my own before getting the explanation. Even if I got a problem right I would still watch him do it because sometimes he would have an easier method of solving something compared to what I would do. After that, I did all 800 practice problems in the Islam book (except the 20 or so on computational tools since that’s not on the exam). Using both Mark Mattson and doing several hundred review problems are the main two important things, and I think it’s essential to do both in conjunction. One or the other on their own isn’t enough.

I took two full length practice exams and both interactives and would recommend doing the 2020 official NCEES practice exam and the two interactives. The first exam I took was from Learnova, and I took it before I started any other studying. That was nice because it gave me a good feel of the exam contents, format, and reference manual before I started studying.

In my last few days of studying, I ended up using free resources from Genie prep. There is a pdf with ~100 problems you can download for free from the genie prep website and it had links to YouTube video solutions to each problem. Some of the problems from that pdf are on the more challenging end but it helped me on the exam, especially with fluids and statistics. I also watched some videos from DirectHub that were beneficial.

After I finished each practice exam I spent a lot of time going through what I got wrong. I noticed a few common patterns of things and devoted a lot of time to that later in my studying.

Hope this helps!

Hello all, I've taken the FE twice so far and have failed. I have been using Prep FE and the Ncess Practice exam handbook, and mark Matteson videos for prep. I need to stick to a strict study schedule but it is very hard to me to stay disciplined. especially after work. I am looking into the PP2I prep as it is live classes and will help me stay more consistent in studying. do you think it is worth it or should i try another test prep class! i need something that will make me feel more accountable!