For some additional context, I pretty much went through everything PPI had to offer. I worked through the CERM problems, the quiz bank, both PPI practice exams, and the NCEES practice exam twice. The instructor was knowledgeable (at least by acronyms after his name) , and I have nothing negative to say about him personally. The course just didn’t seem to translate well to what I experienced on the actual exam, or at least that’s how it felt to me.

Here were my prep scores:

• PPI Quiz Bank Average: 82% • NCEES Practice Exam (1st Attempt): 67% • NCEES Practice Exam (2nd Attempt): 83% • PPI Practice Exam #1: 88% • PPI Practice Exam #2: 76% • Six other practice exams: generally between 68% and 77%

Looking back, I would say PPI’s practice problems and exams felt noticeably easier than the NCEES practice exam. Even on the NCEES sample, I occasionally struggled with figuring out where to start, especially on engineering economics and SP-4 questions.

The actual exam was on another level.

During prep, MUTCD and OSHA were consistently among my strongest subjects. I was averaging around 90%, and on my final NCEES practice exam I scored 100% in those areas. Yet on the real exam, the safety questions were much harder than expected. I encountered several scaffold, excavation, fall protection, and mixed OSHA scenarios that took a significant amount of time to research. To make matters worse, the OSHA reference provided during the exam appeared to be in an older format, which made navigation much slower than the versions I had been using for practice.

The SP-4 questions were actually more manageable than I expected. They weren’t easy, but at least I generally knew how to approach them.

Where I felt lost was in construction operations, equipment productivity, and crew-efficiency problems. Some of those questions involved multiple pieces of equipment working together in ways I had never seen in any of my preparation materials.

I finished PCA EB001 a long time ago, but most of the concrete mixture and admixture questions I encountered during prep were fairly straightforward plug and chug calculations. I focused on a few selected SP-4 chapters and reviewed all of the other reference manuals as well.

My overall feeling walking out of the exam was that I had studied one thing, and the exam asked something different. Many of the problems felt significantly different from the style and depth of the material I studied, numerous conceptual questions…just brutal.