Geotechnical Engineer Exam

[geonad]

Has anyone taken the California Geotechnical Engineer Exam lately? Any feedback? How many questions on the exam?

 

[Okiryu]

I took it on May this year and passed it. The exam is difficult and you need to study and go thru several references. Perhaps the NAVFAC manuals are the best references. A lot of questions about own engineering judgment, soil testing and field exploration. Reading technical papers and participating in this forums helped me a lot. There are not long questions for calculations. Look at the recommended references from the CA board and check the ones that are related to seismic stuff. Good luck!

 

[geonad]

Thank you. How long did it take to get your result back? Some people say 4 months.

 

[Okiryu]

The results come back after once the exam period finishes. So for May exams, results are available in June and for October exams I guess that the results are available in November. Good luck!

 

[howardoark]

I also passed the GE exam. Like all of those tests, it's really a test of how organized your references are and how well you budget your time. My suggestion would be go through one of the GE practice tests/books and carefully index your references wrt to problem types so you don't spend any time looking for the right reference. On the morning session, you need to go through the exam quickly answering the questions you know how to answer without resorting to references. If you get to the end of the test period and you haven't even looked at the last 10 questions, you have probably missed five easy ones. And you should have a reference on filters - I was really annoyed that one of the questions I had to answer was designing a filter for a levee and I didn't have the reference (is it D10/D60 <7? I didn't know).

 

[ocgeo]

Coduto has new theories on filter design, so if you use the wrong reference you get it wrong. Are you supposed to use the new or the old. There are a lot of really good questions, and some that are really poor. It needs more funding to develop a better study guide than a list of 21 references, however with only 100 or 200 test takers per year, there may not be any funding for exam prep.