Indranil Goswami - Fundamentals of Engineering FE Civil All-in-One Exam Guide

Indranil Goswami, Ph.D., P.E., is a registered Professional Engineer in Maryland and has been a professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore. He is currently a senior consulting engineer. He is the author of Civil Engineering PE All-in-One Exam Guide and was the recipient of the 2016 Engineering Education Excellence Award from the National Society of Professional Engineers.

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This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother and my uncle Kakamoni, both of whom were a source of endless support and inspiration for me but could not see it published.

This book was written to assist the student preparing for the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) Civil examination. It consists of condensed review material and approximately 440 solved examples of difficulty level appropriate for this exam. As of January 2014, the FE Civil exam has consisted of approximately 110 questions in the following subject areas:

In this book, the content is organized in the same order as the official (NCEES) syllabus. Whenever appropriate, solutions include specific suggestions and relevant strategic advice.

When attempting the practice problems, students are advised to use a digital (PDF) copy of the FE Reference Handbook (currently in version 9.4), so they can get accustomed to navigating it in electronic form, rather than as a paper document. Make sure that you use the most current version because there have been significant changes in organization and content from the eighth to the ninth edition.

On the actual exam, the examinee will have 5 hours and 20 minutes to answer 110 questions. That is an average pace of about 3 minutes per problem. The first 55 questions will represent the first half of the exam (covered in and, after the break, will have more than 4 hours available to answer the remaining 55 questions. Another examinee may do exactly the opposite.

In these practice problems, I have tried to keep the difficulty level reasonable. Some are easier than others. However, some of the questions, in spite of being more difficult than the 3-minute variety, have been included because they reinforce a critical area of learning. On the actual test, there will invariably be a mix of questions of various difficulty levels, and a well-prepared examinee will be able to recognize quickly whether a particular problem is easy enough to attempt right away or one that should be put aside and come back to later. This is a very important strategy for an exam as fast-paced and as diverse as the FE Civil exam.