(00:09): What is up everybody? Isaac here with Civil Engineering Academy, excited to be with you in another podcast episode. Appreciate you liking and subscribing to this stuff. It's always good to get the word out in this weird niche we're in, so civil engineering. Anyway, I'm excited about today's episode. I am going solo with you today. We're gonna talk about a four step method to help you prepare to pass your exam and that could apply to FE and pe. We're gonna call it the CEA pass method. It's something you're gonna wanna pay attention to because most people that are studying are doing it the wrong way. And it's not because you're not smart enough. A lot of times it's just because you don't understand or you're spending your energy on the wrong stuff. And so my goal is to try to change that and we're gonna talk about this four step method to pass.

(00:51): I've helped engineers, thousands of engineers really prepare taking pass their PE exam and their FD exam. And we've been doing this for 10 plus years, helping engineers prepare for these exams. And so I've had a chance to find out a few things out about how people are preparing for this stuff and what the common mistakes are that are out there. And so with that, we've got a simple four step strategy we wanna talk about. We've labeled it our CEA pass method and it's gonna be coming up right after this. We'll see you in a minute.

(01:21): Hey, before we get to the really good stuff, I wanna tell you about our course. I just got a sweet testimonial I have to read to you. It's from Barney who just took his PE exam and he said, I just wanted to let you know I took the PE exam a couple weeks back and passed your course was super helpful, especially as someone who's been working in the water slash wastewater industry for 25 years. But that means it's been over 25 years since I even looked at this stuff. Thanks Barney. It is simple. It is to the point if you want to prepare to pass your exams, your PE exam, we've got a course built for you. And the whole thing is there, all the lecture modules, all the practice problems, all the practice exams and especially, and the most importantly is the support that you can re receive by joining Civil Engineering Academy on our courses. People love the support and, and our practice exams too. We've got a sweet simulator in there. All that good stuff is there waiting for you. If you are interested in passing your FE exam, go check out civil fe review course.com. If you're interested in passing your PE exam, check out civil pe review course.com and you can find both of those by just heading to our main [email protected]. Alright, let's get to the good stuff. See ya.

(02:39): Alright, let's jump in today's episode. Let's first talk about what this four step method is. There's four steps that we like to to call in our CEA pass method. The first one is a preview and what that means is you're gonna start strong by reviewing the basics. Sometimes you've been outta school for a while. We gotta get back into study habits. So that first step is really a preview. The second one is going to be apply, that's A-P-P-L-Y apply. We wanna improve the basics by putting in the steps and the reps to get there to get where we need to go. The the next step, our third step is gonna be solidify. We wanna make sure this stuff is sticking for the long term. We do not wanna forget this stuff as we get closer to the exam time. And our last step here is to simulate and that means we're gonna build your exam taking skills and making sure they are solid by simulating the real deal.

(03:31): So that is as a whole the four step method. Let's talk about each one of these in detail. Alright, let's first talk about previewing, which is basically starting very strong in the basics. This is one that a lot of people make a mistake on. They get bogged down by reviewing maybe the theory too much. A lot of times we start getting review manuals or we start getting books and we think that we're gonna have to study topics all the way over again down to every little tiny detail. And that's just not the case. You don't need to master every single aspect of your college engineering coursework anymore. The truth is, is you definitely don't need a PhD in hydrology or any other subject to really get started and studying basic runoff concepts. That's just not the way we need to do this. And that's why the goal of this preview phase is really just to get a baseline understanding of where you're at.

(04:22): No mastery of the subject, no memorization and no PhD required. We're gonna focus on grasping the core concepts and equations just enough to get our feet underneath us. So how are you gonna do this? Well, there's a couple things that you can do. The first thing that you're gonna do is simply watch a lecture video from the review course that maybe you have access to or if you're a member of our course, you're gonna watch a lecture video related to that topic. And then you can also read a chapter about it in any sort of review manual that you've got at your disposal. The second thing you wanna do is take your own notes. If you're watching a review or you're taking a review manual, you're going through the material or you're watching a lecture, make sure you're taking your own notes. Take a study journal.

(05:05): That stuff is gonna be very helpful to you, especially as you identify your weak points. Third thing you're gonna do is solve some simple problems. Make sure you got a baseline understanding whether that's preliminary problems that are given to you throughout the lectures. Maybe they're in the review book that you've got. And after that, why don't you go ahead and put a pause on it and stop and kind of see where you're at. Okay, what we're trying to do here is we want to be able to move on as soon as we have a basic understanding, just enough of the material so that we can start doing practice problems. And you may be asking why is that? And that's because real learning doesn't come from consuming the same material about the same topic over and over again. Instead, it actually comes from applying what you know about it.

(05:47): And that's the key here is that you need to apply what you learn. And that is actually the next step in this whole process is to apply. We're gonna improve on those basics that we just identified by putting in the reps. Now a lot of people think that they have to master the theory in order to do the practice problems themselves. And that's actually backwards. It should go very opposite of that. You should be able to practice your problems and then the theory will come later. You'll get the theory as you're doing the problems. And honestly, the best way to do that is by taking practice exams. It's one of the top most effective ways and study techniques in order to produce real results and real learning. And you may be asking, well, why is that? That's because it's a type of retrieval process that we're doing in our minds.

(06:34): It's a bit of practice that's going on. You're trying to retrieve the information that you've put into your mind and get that thing on a piece of paper. You're retrieving it from your memory and pulling that information out of your memory really cements this stuff into your brain and making it much more likely that you'd be able to recall this stuff in the future. And it of course in, in your case, that's gonna be on exam day. I wanna read to you another quote or a quote from one of our past students. He's now a course creator of our CFM exam, the certified floodplain manager and an active member in our community and really part of the team now. But he took our course to help him prepare for his PE exam. His name's Matt F And he said, when I first prepared for the PE exam, I focused a lot on the theory.

(07:17): And when I took the exam, I quickly realized I did not cover enough practice problems. Covering the theory in as much detail as I did is appropriate for a college course, but not for preparation for the FE or the PE exam. And here's the real key. The majority of your exam prep should be spent on practicing problems. So there you go. It's really hard to argue that and I totally a hundred percent agree that's where we need to be. And so to kind of wrap all of that up, this all applies to the apply step as part of our CEA pass method. You need to apply topic specific problems to the subject that you are studying. So how do you do that? How do you set up a study time that's specific to the topics of the material that you need to cover? Well, it's not brain surgery here.

(08:04): All you're doing is setting up chunks of time in your schedule that are dedicated to those topics. So if it's during the weekday, we wanna dedicate, you know, probably two hours to the weekday each day to a specific topic if you can. Or some people reserve the weekends like four to six hours to study time there. All in all, you're putting two, typically two hours during a weekday and four to six on the weekends in your study prep. But dedicate any of those study chunks into a specific topic that's related to what you're studying. Keep your notes handy too, that study journal that's gonna be helpful, right? The stuff that you know that you're struggling with so you can remember it in the future. And also make sure you're using the references that are part of the PE exam at your disposal. You only want to use the resources that you can take with you into the exam, which is gonna be the handbook, the codes and standards and the recommended calculator.

(08:51): Now if you are a fan of civil engineering academy, this is exactly why we started a YouTube channel. We have tons of practice problems in there and you can actually go within there and search certain categories of problems, find them there. It's also why we have an amazing course set up to help with this because we've aligned our lectures with video practice problems that are aligned to the topic that you're studying, making it a no brainer to hit the topics that you need to. In addition to that, we even suggest extra homework. So you're getting even more problems from resources that you probably readily have because anyone that's preparing for the PE exam has this sort of material. So we're trying to hit that topic very hard with a ton of practice problems. So you're making sure you're getting some serious focus on that topic.

(09:34): And again, if you are interested, we have a lot of free resources on our YouTube channel. And so if you want to see a slice of that, you can go check that out. You can check out some video practice problems there based on specific categories that you're studying. Alright, the next step in our past method is to solidify what you're studying. We wanna make sure this stuff is sticking for the long term. So a lot of times what we do is we hit a subject hard but we know our, our exam is maybe four months down the road. So you've hit that subject hard and then we never revisit it again. And that's a problem. That's a big mistake that we end up making. So your brain actually follows what's called the forgetting curve. Meaning that if you don't revisit a topic, you know after some time that you end up forgetting stuff, just what happens with us, right?

(10:18): We're humans. So at the very beginning you're gonna have like a hundred percent of retention and over time that curve just kind of slowly drops down unless you're using it over and over again. So if you're not using it, you're losing it. You know the saying, we wanna make sure we're revisiting some material every once in a while. And that's really what the solidify, you know, step is all about in this past method is that we want to solidify our learning of past topics that we don't want to, I guess let go by the wayside right now. You can stop this entire forgetting process by scheduling regular review sessions in your study diet. And the way you could do this in month one of your study time, what you're typically gonna do is practice problems from all the topics that you're gonna study in that month.

(11:00): But let's say you're down the road, now we're in month three. What we wanna do is mix up some of our study time. We wanna practice problems from the topics that we hit back in month one through three, making sure we're sprinkling those in into our review material. And the same thing as we march this along, if we go to month five, we're making sure we're studying topics or mixing in some problems that really cover the other previous months in our study time. And sometimes this naturally happens as we look at practice exams or do additional practice problems, but especially practice exams, you know the topics that you've already covered. And so you're sprinkling in some of those topics as you're preparing for your exam prep. But it's helpful to kinda do a recheck. We don't wanna forget the material that we studied in the past as we're moving towards the future.

(11:43): So kind of a regular recall or a review of your notes and such will help to cement this stuff in your memory. So this is our final step in the CEA pass study method and that is to take practice exams. You wanna simulate the real deal just like it. Make sure you're replicating the real exam either with CBT exams or if you have paper-based exams, put a timer on and make sure you've given yourself a room with just a calculator. The codes and standards typically in PDF form 'cause that's where you're gonna have on your exam and take this thing timed, you can break that up in different chunks. Say you got four hours in a day, take the other half and four hours the next day. But you have to do this stuff like the real deal. Make sure it's simulated. Now what this is gonna do for you, it's gonna help you build stand.

(12:26): It's also gonna help you with your time taking ability because you're gonna be able to whe how many problems you can do in a minute. Done. You know, you have six minutes per problem on the pe, this is gonna help with that time management stuff. A lot of people struggle with that. It's gonna help with your stama because you probably haven't been sitting down for like four hour chunks to take a practice exam. And there is some serious mental exhaustion that's happening when we're sitting down that long trust. Anybody that's taken the PE exam or FE exam after they're done with it, they are exhausted. It's brain frying. Okay? So we wanna make sure we're putting in the reps just like exercise well, well before the real deal. Now if you have the time, if you have six months of study prep, I typically recommend taking a practice exam around month two, around month four and around month six before you take the real deal.

(13:14): Month two is gonna be kind of a a gauge to see where you are, like you're just starting out, find out your weakest areas month four. That second one is gonna be a real good indicator of how well you're preparing for your exam. And the last one's gonna be the real test on how well you're gonna be prepared for the real exam. And we wanna make sure you're shooting for around a 70% on these practice exams. That's typically give and take the passing score to pass your FE or pe, but sometimes they, it's a little less than that, sometimes a little more. Shoot for 70 and you can feel confident going into the exam during your exam day. Now, after you take these practice exams, you're gonna wanna use that study journal and make sure you're marking what your weakest points are, look at the problems.

(13:57): Maybe there's a concept that we need to remind ourself over and over again what we missed. And so fill in that knowledge gap with that material that you know you're lacking. But keep it in that study general definitely will help you in the long term. And I can tell you again and again, those that actually simulate the real exam are those that are actually passing it. So make sure you are simulating your exams. Alright, let's go ahead and wrap this one up. You may be asking, will the CEA pass method actually help me pass the exam following this four step process? It will, but you actually have to put the pencil to paper and do the work. There is no substitute for that. There is no course or magic wand out there that's gonna take that from you. You actually have to do the work.

(14:36): So if you need help on that journey, we are here to support you every step of the way. If you're taking your FE or pe, check us out civil engineering academy.com. We've got courses, exams, and other resources there for you and even free stuff on our YouTube channel as well. So let's go ahead and wrap this up. Thanks for being here. Go follow that four step process. Our CEA pass method is gonna get you over the hump of passing and don't hesitate to reach out if you need help with that. We'll see you later. See you in the next one. Bye.