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.
We take that one step further in DTC’s Mechanical PE Exam Review courses by providing you with a Reference Handbook Companion to help you determine which equations are critical. We also provide you with important equations that are NOT in the Reference Handbook, because they are not all in there. So please consider letting us help you prepare for this challenge and the many others you will need to master to pass the exam. – Dr. Tom
“With the shift to CBT, the entire methodology for how to study and what to do on game-day has changed. The DTC method does an incredible job of teaching you what is in the reference handbook, but just as importantly it shows you what is not. The Reference Handbook Companion pages provided for each week were key to effective studying and I credit my performance on the MDM Exam largely to Dr. Tom and his review course.”
– Andy Musselwhite, US Navy. Boston, Massachusetts
