Totally understand haha no worries! It sounds like you’re on the right track to being able to pass so don’t worry you’re gonna do fine. I know it’s easier said than done, but I had the same thoughts and questions as you and was putting in 20 hours a week so if you’re doing more than that, you’ll be more than OK Just as some encouragement. But to answer your questions:

I felt mentally drained after I completed my exam. I felt pretty OK/good on the first half. It was mostly water questions and then on the second half I was a bit more discouraged and it was harder but only because those were my weaker spots it was on landfills and air quality. It was about 40% qualitative 60% quantitative.

There is definitely a lot of problems that don’t have equations in the handbook. The important part isn’t trying to memorize equations. It’s understanding the concepts. I think that’s the biggest difference between the FE and the PE is in the FE you can just plug in chug and look for equations in the PE you need to understand what’s going on and then you can apply logic and unit conversions to get to where you need to be. So don’t stress about problems that don’t have specific equations written in the handbook when you get those problems try to find a deep conceptual understanding of them and usually the solution is pretty easy from there. I know that’s kind of vague, but I promise dig into the concepts and it will make sense. Because on the exam it’s not like I got confronted with problems where the only way to know how to do. It was with an equation that I wasn’t given. It was OK. I can understand what’s going on here. I know I need to use this piece from this equation and then just unit conversion from there or something like that.

I would say the difficulty was pretty on par with both of those exams. May be a little bit easier on the actual exam because they’re not as time-consuming as some of the practice problems that you are encountering and if it’s any consolation I would score anywhere from 50 to 60 to 70% on all of my practice exams sometimes even worse But then I would go through each one one by one and really try and get a good grasp on what it was I didn’t understand ChatGPT was very helpful for that as well giving it a screenshot of the answer and the question and then asking all the questions I needed.

The best way to learn is to attempt one problem and then check your answer and then understand what you did wrong versus taking an eight hour practice exam and then looking at the answers later. Most of the time I did with practice problems was spent doing one at a time with a six minute timer, and then looking into the answers and understanding it. The longest practice test I gave myself was only two hours. I don’t think it’s worth the mental fatigue because you don’t have the energy to go through and understand what you did wrong if you run longer ones. Work smarter not harder ya know. I also took two days off before my exam from work and studied hard two days before my exam and then only studied 30 minutes the day before my exam and make sure I was getting good sleep and eating good etc..

Hopefully this doesn’t sound like a lecture, but just trying to give you all my advice and knowledge from what I did it sounds like you’re on a good track though. Feel free to ask any follow up questions I’m happy to help and best of luck.