Taking a PE Practice Exam

Simulate the real thing – start at 8:00AM, make sure you aren’t disturbed, and set a 4-hour timer. Have your ear plugs, water bottle, & snacks with you. Do the ‘morning’ section of one of your PE practice exams. Take an hour break (eat!). Set a 4-hour timer and do the ‘afternoon’ section of the exam. On PE practice exam days, I usually took the rest of the day off. Nine hours of ‘thinking’ is kind of exhausting.

To be clear – if life doesn’t allow you to do a proper simulation, that is also fine. If you need to do the exam in two (4 hour) chunks on two consecutive weeknights, go for it. Stalling your studying to ‘wait’ for a weekend day doesn’t make sense.

How do I estimate my exam score?

NCEES is pretty tight-lipped about their scoring process, but you can still estimate how you did during your exam.

I used a ‘1-2-3’ method while taking the PE practice exams. I used to do this in college – it helps identify which questions to return to at the end, and lets you estimate how you did on the exam (so you can spend less time worrying afterwords.) While working on the questions, annotate each one with a ‘1, 2, or 3’ on the far right margin of the page.

1 = I’m sure I got this right.

2 = I was able to narrow it down to 2 answers (of a possible 4) and I had to ‘guess’ a little between those two.

3 = No better than a monkey, I guessed.

When you get through the exam once, you can go back and work on the ‘2’ or ‘3’ questions. If you work on a ‘2’ and decide you got it right, you scratch out the ‘2’ and replace it with a ‘1’. When you have only a few minutes left, you tally up how many of each number you have. Do some quick math, and estimate how you did.

(quantity of ‘1’ questions) * (0.9) = A

(quantity of ‘2’ questions) * (0.5) = B

(quantity of ‘3’ questions) * (0.25) = C

Add A+B+C, and then divide that sum by the total number of questions (40 per section) to get a ‘percentage’ of how you did.

Example;

Say you had 30 questions marked as ‘1’ (A=30), 30 questions marked as ‘2’ (B=2) and 20 questions marked as ‘3’ (C=20) out of the total 80 questions. That would be (30*0.9)+(30*0.5)+(20*0.25) = 47. So your estimate is that you got 47 out of 80 questions right, or 58.75%. When I did this on my first practice exam, my estimate was that I got a 33% (true answer was 38%). When I did this on the actual exam, my estimate was a 74% (and I passed – but I don’t know what a passing grade is on the exam). I lean on the conservative size while doing this exercise, so some of my ‘2’ answers may be closer to a ‘1’ – but I’d rather come up with my ‘lowest possible score’ during this exercise.

When you get to the end of your ‘first pass’ at all of the questions, you can choose to:

-Return to the ‘1’ questions, and double-check your math

-Return to the ‘2’ questions and try to determine the correct answer out of the two you have narrowed it down to

-Return to the ‘3’ questions and try to at least eliminate a few answers, and bump that up to a ‘2’.

This is really a personal preference as to which you think will increase your overall exam score.

When the PE practice exam is finished, grade yourself (or have someone grade you) immediately. My partner used an excel spreadsheet to grade me. This was great because I could ‘sort’ the columns by ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ and therefore start working on solutions accordingly.

Now back to the Step-by-Step method