The Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Exam, designed and administered by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES) in Clemson, South Carolina, is the first step on the road to becoming a professional engineer. Passing it will qualify you as an Engineer in Training (or EIT). It is a detailed, time-consuming test that demands considerable expertise not only in engineering but in related areas of mathematics and physical science as well as business and economics. It is intended for those students nearing completion of undergraduate engineering degrees and requires that you have documented coursework in the engineering field and approval from your state’s engineering licensure board. But no matter how confident you feel about your mastery of engineering knowledge based on your college experiences, it is not advised that you go into this test without some sort of advance preparation specific to the test itself. In other words, you’ll need some sort of study guide.

Fortunately, study guides are available and can be ordered over the Internet. Some are in book form, others in the form of flash cards, still others as DVDs or CDs or software. All will give you a detailed look at how the test works, what information is likely to be on it, and what you will need to know in order to get a passing score. One of the most important things that you will learn from such an FE Exam study guide is just what topics will be covered on the exam and what aspects of those topics are going to be most important for you to know.
Although a study guide will go into a wealth of detail on the contents of the exam, far more than can be covered on this Web site, we can give you a rough idea of what will be on the FE Exam. It is divided into a pair of four-hour sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The morning portion of the test will consist of 120 general questions covering knowledge relevant to all disciplines of engineering. These will include computers, mathematics, probability and statistics, chemistry, statics and dynamics, strength of materials, material properties, fluid mechanics, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, ethics and business practices, and engineering economics. However, it’s not enough just to know that these topics will be included on the test. A study guide will give you sample questions that will show you how these topics will be addressed and give you information about the specific emphasis that will be placed on these topics, which aspects of these topics you will most need to know and what level of detail you will need to understand these topics at.

The afternoon portion of the test will vary according to what module you choose to take. (This choice is made at the time of registration.) The available modules, each consisting of 60 questions and representing those engineering specialties that you wish to work in during your career, are (in alphabetical order) chemical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering, environmental engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering and a test on other engineering disciplines not covered by the first six. A study guide for the FE Exam will look at each of these topics in turn and break it down into the subtopics you’ll need to know in order to get a passing score on that module. For instance, the section on the electrical engineering module would tell you that the subject will be further broken down into these subtopics: circuitry, control systems, power, communications, electromagnetics, signal processing, electronics, computer systems, and digital systems. But a good study guide will go farther than that and will offer sample questions on each of these subtopics and the specific types of information on these topics that you will most likely need to know. And the study guide will do this for all seven modules available for the afternoon portion of the test, making it essential for anyone who wants to guarantee a passing grade on whichever module they choose to take to read such a guide.

Preparing for the FE Exam

If you’re reading this Web page, there’s a good chance that you’re a college undergraduate working on a four-year degree in engineering. When you get that degree, you’ll probably want to take the FE (Fundamentals of Engineering) Exam. This exam, administered by a national engineering organization known as NCEES (for National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying), is your next step on the road to becoming a fully accredited professional engineer. It won’t take you all the way there. That will require approximately four years of experience in the engineering field and successfully taking the Principles and Practice in Engineering (PE) exam. But getting a passing grade on the FE Exam will qualify you as an Engineer-in-Training (EIT) and that’s the only way to begin achieving what is almost certainly your eventual goal: becoming a professional engineer.

The FE Exam is no walk in the park, however. It is an eight-hour marathon of an exam, taken in two sessions on a single day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon with a one-hour lunch break in between. The questions that it asks are comprehensive. They will deeply test your knowledge of general engineering and related science principles as well as specific information about the engineering subspecialty of your choice. Your choices of subspecialties, at least as far as the FE Exam is concerned, are chemical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering, environmental engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering and a miscellany of other engineering disciplines not covered by the first six specialties. The test includes a module for each and you are allowed to choose one at the time of your test registration.

You’ll want to do well on the FE Exam. After all, the rest of your life depends on it. (You will be allowed to retake the exam if you flunk it the first time, but isn’t it always better to get these things right on the first try?) What, then, do you want to do to prepare?

Well, you’re already doing the most important thing. You’re getting your four-year engineering degree. Your four years as an undergraduate majoring in engineering at an ABET-accredited engineering college will give you the opportunity to grapple seriously with all of the topics that will constitute the FE exam when it comes time to take it. So you’re already well on your way to doing well on the exam. (This assumes, of course, that you’re taking your engineering studies seriously. You don’t want your life at college to be no fun at all, of course, but you might save some of the partying until after you have that Engineer-in-Training title under your belt.)

But what can you do next? Just because you’ve worked hard for your undergraduate engineering degree doesn’t mean that the FE Exam isn’t going to hit you with some unexpected curveballs. You don’t want to sit down at the exam table and realize that there are several questions on the test concerning knowledge areas that you somehow never got around to studying. So what you really need is a study guide. Honest. There are several companies willing to sell you study guides for the FE exam in various forms, from flashcards to complete books, that will give you sample questions and detailed descriptions of precisely the sort of thing the NCEES is likely to ask you about. These study guides are sold widely and you’ll probably see ads for them on the Internet. Check them out, decide which ones look like they fit the style of learning you feel most comfortable with, and buy one. It may be expensive or at least may cost a little more than the movie that you and your friends are planning to see this weekend, but it will also have a more profound effect on your future. If a study guide helps you pass the FE Exam and sets you on the road to becoming a professional engineer, it’s worth its weight in gold. At the very least.

The Contents of the FE Exam

The precise contents of the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Exam are, of course, a secret. If you knew the contents of the exam in advance, you would have an unfair advantage over other examinees. Nonetheless, the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES), the national organization that devises and administers the FE Exam, makes its basic contents known so that you will know which areas of the engineering field to study and just how important each of them will be to your final exam score. Having this knowledge in advance makes it a lot more likely that you’ll achieve a passing score on the test, so on this page we’ll tell you as much about the contents of the test as we know.

The most important thing to understand about the FE Exam is that it consists of two sessions and that you will take both of them in the same day. Each session is four hours long and you will get a one-hour lunch break in between them, so be prepared to put in long hours on this test (and even longer hours studying for it in advance). Each of the two sessions has a different purpose, with the morning session (which consists of 120 questions) intended to measure your general engineering knowledge and the afternoon session (which consists of 60 questions) intended to measure your specific knowledge of a single subspecialty of the engineering field. Here are the two parts of the test and a rough outline of their contents:

The Morning Session.
The morning session tests your general knowledge of engineering and related fields. It is the same for everyone because it contains knowledge required by all engineers. As the test is currently given, the topics covered in the morning session and their relative importance to your final score are:

• Chemistry (9%)
• Computers (7%)
• Electricity and magnetism (9%)
• Engineering economics (8%)
• Engineering mechanics- statics and dynamics (10%)
• Ethics and business practices (7%)
• Fluid mechanics (7%)
• Material properties (7%)
• Mathematics (15%)
• Probability and statistics in engineering (7%)
• Strength of materials (7%)
• Thermodynamics (7%)

The Afternoon Session
The afternoon session consists of seven modules on various subspecialties of engineering. You choose a single module at the time of registration and your choice determines the topics you’ll be tested on. The modules and the topics covered in them are:

Chemical engineering

• chemistry (10%)
• material/energy balances (15%)
• chemical engineering thermodynamics (10%)
• fluid dynamics (10%)
• heat transfer (10%)
• mass transfer (10%)
• chemical reaction engineering (10%)
• process design and economic optimization (10%)
• computer usage in chemical engineering (5%)
• process control (5%)
• safety, health, and environment (5%)

Civil engineering

• surveying (11%)
• hydraulics and hydrologic systems (12%)
• soil mechanics and foundations (15%)
• environmental engineering (12%)
• transportation (12%)
• structural analysis (10%)
• structural design (10%)
• construction management (10%)
• materials (8%)

Electrical engineering

• circuits (16%)
• power (13%)
• electromagnetics (7%)
• control systems (10%)
• communications (9%)
• signal processing (8%)
• electronics (15%)
• digital systems (12%)
• computer systems (10%)

Environmental engineering

• water resources (25%)
• water and wastewater engineering (30%)
• air quality engineering (15%)
• solid and hazardous waste engineering (15%)
• environmental science and management (15%)
• Industrial engineering
• engineering economics (15%)
• probability and statistics (15%)
• modeling and computation (12%)
• industrial management (10%)
• manufacturing and production systems (13%)
• facilities and logistics (12%)
• human factors, productivity, ergonomics, and work design (12%)
• quality (11%)

Mechanical engineering

• mechanical design and analysis (15%)
• kinematics, dynamics, and vibrations (15%)
• materials and processing (10%)
• measurements, instrumentation, and controls (10%)
• thermodynamics and energy conversion processes (15%)
• fluid mechanics and fluid machinery (15%)
• heat transfer (10%)
• refrigeration and HVAC (10%)
• General engineering
• advanced engineering mathematics (10%)
• engineering probability and statistics (9%)
• engineering economics (10%)
• application of engineering mechanics (13%)
• engineering of materials (11%)
• fluids (15%)
• electricity and magnetism (12%)
• thermodynamics and heat transfer (15%)

Obviously, when studying for the afternoon session you will only need to concentrate on those topics that are part of the module that you’ve signed up for. Any good study guide should contain a section for each of these modules and solid information about the sort of questions that might be asked about these topics on the actual test.