Mechanical Engineers, for better or worse, the NCEES Reference Handbook will be your only reference during the PE Exam, so becoming as familiar as possible with what is in it and how to find what you need should be top priority.
You don’t need to know where everything is, but you should be very familiar with how it’s organized, which chapters are relevant to your exam, what general topics are covered, and where important charts are located. The Reference Handbook is not organized the way the courses you took in school were organized. So even though you’ll be using the search feature to find what you need most of the time, understanding how it’s organized will come in handy.
Take some time to browse through the chapters associated with your exam and see what’s there. You might even want to consider printing out the those chapters so that you can review them in printed form, make notes and highlight important equations. – Dr. Tom
