Get Effective Study Habits
The first thing you need to succeed is to have effective study habits. For myself, I found this MOOC on Learning How To Learn taught me the correct habits that greatly accelerated my training so that in just 13 months I completed 10 technical exams and the FE exam. That was a marked improvement over the previous 5 years where I only cleared 3 technical exams and the NPPE. The lessons in the MOOC such as the power of active learning, interleaving, and chunking go a long ways.
A simple egg timer app like Productivity Challenge Timer can be a gamechanger. Study in 10 – 15 minute intervals with 3 – 5 minute breaks in between to get into top-end exam shape like an Udarnik.
Make Getting Ready for the Exam a Priority
Impossible, right?
You have work, family and community obligations. Writing a technical exam will always come last unless you decide to commit to abandoning those other obligations for a time.
What I found worked best for me was using 100% of my vacation time to study for technical exams.
Yes, you can write four technical exams in one week. But to do this you need to fully book off two weeks and go to the library 12 hours per day. This is what worked for me and in fact I didn’t study at all outside of that compressed time period.
Use the Right Textbooks the Right Way
The Engineers Canada / PEO syllabus is accompanied by a list of recommended textbooks.
While you should have a high level familiarity with the contents of these books, they rarely are the right choice for self-study.
First, please understand that reading and taking notes from a textbook is the absolutely worst way to spend your time.
What I found works the best is this procedure:
- Go to the local university and get all the student texts relevant to the technical exam subject
- Go to the back of each book to see how many have answers to problems in each chapter
- Reject any and all texts that have few or no answers to problems
- Turn to the problems at the end of the second chapter and get to work.
- Read nothing in the text that does not directly help you solve the problems.
- Further reduce your short list of texts to those you find you are making the best progress.
- Consider buying a couple of the best books – especially for an open-book exam.
A student text book without lots of problems & answers and that is not clearly written is simply a waste of time to use. Do not waste your time.
Write Practice Exams
It is not effective to just sit down and start reading through past exam solutions. No, you cannot just buy solutions from CyberEd and expect to pass. You still need to apply active learning techniques. You should always first be ready to give a good attempt on the questions yourself. The solutions should only be used as a comparative check with your own work.
Ideally you want to write at least three practice exams before each technical exam you write. You want to simulate the exam conditions when you write these practice exams. Plan on writing the first practice exam three or more days in advance of your exam. Then write at least two more before the exam. Go over the solutions to each question to improve your understanding. Writing multiple practice technical exams will give you a complete picture of the questions you may find on the exam.
The regulators have statements on their websites cautioning about relying on using technical exam past papers to understand what will be on the exam. Yes, you should not just use practice exams. You need to study and understand the concepts more broadly. But the truth is that the exams rarely change with most exams repeating the same sorts of questions year after year. If you write at least three practice exams, it will be very unlikely that you will have to answer questions that are unfamiliar to you.