Practice Problems for the Mechanical Engineering PE Exam: A Companion to the Mechanical Engineering Reference Manual

I passed the Fall 2017 PE Mechanical: Machine Design and Materials. I purchased four books and used one book I already owned (Shigley). I did around 100 hours of self-study. 1. PE Exam Review for Mechanical Systems, Kennedy 2. Practice Problems for the Mechanical Engineering PE Exam, 13th Ed (this book) 3. Six-Minute Solutions for Mechanical PE Exam Mechanical Systems and Materials Problems, 2nd Ed 4. Mechanical Engineering Reference Manual for the PE Exam, 13th Ed 5. Shigley's Mechanical Engineering Design 6. NCEES Practice Exam 7. Printed and added to hand notes unit conversions, beam tables, MERM index, stress concentration tables I started with the Kennedy book and read the whole thing front to back. Then I solved all of Six-Minute problems. Then I worked all of the problems of MERM practice problems for chapter 45-66. Throughout all of this I took notes on key points and marked pages in MERM and Shigley. About a month before the exam I took the practice exam and did pretty well. From there I just studied concepts or units I had missed.

This book offers a very comprehensive list of practice problems for the Mechanical PE exam. Most problems are more complex than the exam ones, but this helped me to train my brain to solve them faster. I didn't feel it was necessary to solve all problems but I was able to focus on the specific subjects I wanted. This book was really helpful and helped me to pass on the Mechanical PE exam.

This is as massive as the MERM itself. It has probably around a thousand example problems in it with worked out solutions. I recommend starting here. I spent a month and a half reading the MERM cover to cover and that was a waste of time. In one eye and out the other. Get the MERM, this and the Quick Reference and just start doing problems. I recommend spending about an hour on each chapter of problems and using the MERM as your reference on how to solve them. There are some chapters later on you'll know you can skip or skim (Advanced Alternative Energy, Nuclear Power Plants, almost the entire Plant Engineering section, Ethics). Use the NEECS test guidance (its in the front of the MERM) to determine what you shouldn't waste time studying. After you've done that take the NEECS sample breadth exam. Then go back and do every single problem in your depth area, then take the NEECS sample depth exam in your area. At this point you should know about where you stand and what you need to keep studying. All of that above took me about 100 hours to do. I've currently got almost 200 hours of studying under my belt but about 60 of them were mostly wasted hours reading the MERM. I started to get burned out so I've moved on to the 6 minute solution books despite the poor reviews and really like them. I'm estimating I'll end up with a little less than 240 hours of studying under my belt by the time the exam hits in a few weeks (I keep a daily log for tracking and motivation purposes). If thats not enough then nothing probably will be. My only complaint is that there are not enough exam level questions in here, these are either really basic or really hard with relatively few in between. Im basing that off the NEECS sample exam challenge level. I hope that is representative because then I feel I may have a decent chance of passing. I dont plan on doing this more than once!

This is a must-have resource for the Mechanical PE test. The problems in this book are much lenghtier than the real test problems, so it forces you to study harder to figure them out. It makes the test seem easy in comparison to your studies. There were only two questions on my exam that weren't covered in this book.

Quite simply, if you don't use this to study for the Mechanical Design PE, you are either a genius (and hence do not need to study) or a fool.

Going through this book from one end to the other was great preparation for the exam. Plus, having the sample problems in front of me bailed me out in a few instances. Get this and the big reference manual textbook... its worth it.