Customer Reviews

Six-Minute Solutions for Civil PE Exam Water Resources and Environmental Problems

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The Six-Minute Solutions guides are great, especially when preparing for the afternoon portion of the Civil PE exam. Yes, the questions are generally tougher than what you will see on the exam; that's why they are good practice. These questions are in-line with what you can expect on the exam, however the questions are a little more challenging and usually require a few more steps to get to the answer. You wouldn't want an overly easy practice exam and then get slammed on the real exam.

These guides are split up into morning type questions and afternoon type questions. I found that these guides were great preparation for the PE exam. The solutions are detailed enough to follow along and catch your mistakes. The solutions provided are way better approaches to answering the questions than any of the Lindeburg references, and they have fewer mistakes than Lindeburg. Some of the solutions to the Lindeburg guides are just outright wrong. The best guide for practice questions is the NCEES practice exam, but these are a wonderful supplement.

I highly recommend getting the Six-Minute Solutions guide for whichever afternoon session you plan to take. If you do plan to take the Water/Environmental afternoon, get the older separate Six-Minute Solutions for Civil PE Exam Problems: Water Resources and Six-Minute Solutions for Civil PE Exam Environmental Problems guides. This one just combined those two, so there are just fewer questions overall.

Your most basic study library should include the Lindeburg Civil Engineering Reference Manual, the NCEES Practice Exam, and the Six Minute Solutions guide for your afternoon session.

I really like this book. I like how the problems are laid out and are slightly harder than those on the exam. However, I find the Hints at the bottom of every problem annoying. I try to put my finger over them when reading the problems because there will be no hint on the exam and I want to attempt to figure out how to solve the problem on my own. I like the idea of the hints, but wish it was in it's own section preferably between the problems and solution section.

I found this book to be very helpful during the exam. I was able to use some sample problems to help my way through exam problems. The book is broken down into problems you'll see in the morning section and problems you'll see in the afternoon section. It is further broken down into categories of the types of problems. Most of the afternoon problems in this book were more difficult than the actual exam problems.

This book as other people have noted is pretty irrelevant to the PE. The first thing that should be noted is that the questions are MUCH MUCH MUCH harder than the actual PE. A "Six Minute" solution is a pretty big stretch for some of the questions. Most of the questions take at least 10 minutes to solve with some taking well over an hour! One of the the problem requires finding the total flow of a river with literally 20 sections and would take at least 20 minutes to solve using Excel!

Some of the solutions are also strange as well. For instance with minor headlosses in this book, the author seems to hate using K coefficients and opts for equivalent length (I was trained in school with the K coefficient method). If you solve the problem using a K coefficient, then you will NOT get the right answer. It will be close, but not exactly the same. The author even made sure to include an answer accounting for you using the K coefficient that comes out to be wrong. It made me scratch my head, and triple check my work for no reason.

Bottom line is this: this book isn't useful. I felt like I actually wasted my time using this book. Some of the assumptions made were very strange, and if you don't make the same assumption then you will not get the right answer in many cases. On the actual PE, if they want you to make an assumption that is not obvious they will tell you what to assume.

I recommend purchasing the CERM, the practice problems from PPI, the practice exam from PPI, and the NCEES practice exam. The PPI questions are generally much harder than the PE, but they are more RELEVANT to the actual PE. The NCEES practice exam is right on the level of the exam and is something that you really should have in your PE practice problem set at the very least. Using the set mentioned above, I passed the PE the first time I took it.

I bought this book for the PE exam which I just took this weekend. My original plan was to use this for the bulk of my afternoon breadth exam studying but as I got about halfway through the book I couldn't help but feel like the example questions were significantly more difficult than those I could expect to see on the test. The book advertises itself as "6 minute solutions" but very few of the problems could actually be solved in 6 minutes. Many were very obscure and complicated. Also, there were errors in several of the problems which was frustrating. The most annoying part however was that there were a few solutions that used some pretty dubious methodology. I'm not completely sure it was wrong but it definitely didn't jive with my understanding from college.

After I slogged through half the book I switched to the Practice Problems for the CERM which served me well. Those problems were still more difficult than what was on the exam (which I realize is good practice) but they were not as obscure and the solutions were better explained. I'd recommend the Practice Problems book and/or the NCEES sample exam.

This book is definitely worth the money. Although the problems are much harder than those found on the actual PE exam they are good practice. The difficulty of the problems was sometimes discouraging but it was good practice for the exam to 'move on' to the next problem if an especially hard problem was befuddling.

The questions in this book are much harder than the test, but that's ok. My background in Environmental engineering is not very strong, so having a study guide that was harder than the test just better prepared me.

Whether or not this it helped me pass I don't know yet. I think that I get my results in about 4 weeks.

This book is filled with assumptions and some of the solutions are actually incorrect. Waste of money.