PECivilClick sells practice problems and worked solutions. If a solution is wrong, a candidate learns the wrong method and carries it into the exam. This page describes how questions are written, how they are checked, what happens when we get one wrong, and how you can tell us.
Where the questions come from
Every problem in the FE Civil and FE Mechanical banks is written in house. We do not reproduce NCEES practice-exam items, and we do not license or scrape question sets from other providers. Each problem is written against the published NCEES exam specification for its topic, at the difficulty and time budget the real exam implies — roughly three minutes per question.
This matters for a reason beyond copyright: a bank assembled from copied items drifts toward whatever was easy to copy. Writing to the specification is what keeps the topic weights honest.
How a question is checked before it ships
- Solved independently. A reviewer works the problem without looking at the stated answer. If the two disagree, the item goes back.
- Distractors examined. Wrong options have to be wrong for a reason a candidate would plausibly commit — a unit slip, a missed factor, the other sign convention. Options that are wrong for no reason teach nothing.
- Handbook reference verified. Every solution cites where in the FE Reference Handbook the equation or table lives, and the citation is checked against the handbook rather than remembered.
- Figure checked against the text. The figure has to describe the same problem the words describe, and it must not give the answer away by construction.
- Answer-key distribution reviewed. Letter positions are monitored per topic so the correct answer is not predictable from position.
Reviews we run on the existing bank
Shipping is not the end of it. Both banks are periodically re-audited topic by topic: keys re-derived from scratch, solutions re-read for steps that were asserted rather than shown, and figures re-checked against their own problem statements. Corrections found this way are applied to the live bank, not queued.
When we get one wrong
We do get some wrong. When a defect is confirmed:
- The question or solution is corrected in the live bank, usually the same day.
- If the answer key itself was wrong, the item is corrected rather than quietly deleted, so anyone who saw it can see what changed.
- If a whole class of items shares the defect, we audit that class instead of patching the single report.
Found one? Email support@pecivilclick.com with the question and what you think is wrong. Disagreements about a solution are welcome; several bank corrections have started as a subscriber saying "I think your key is off."
How exam facts are sourced
Statements about exam length, question counts, topic weights, fees, scheduling and policy come from NCEES publications — the exam specifications, the Examinee Guide, and the exam-day policy pages — not from forum consensus. Where a rule changed (the FE moving to computer-based testing; the PE Civil losing its breadth portion in April 2024), we date the change rather than describing the current state as if it had always been so.
Pass-rate figures published by NCEES are reproduced as NCEES reports them, attributed, and dated. Our own subscriber pass rate is always labelled as a subscriber figure rather than presented as an exam-wide statistic.
Independence
PECivilClick is an independent exam preparation platform. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by NCEES. Where our guides compare preparation providers, we say plainly that we are one of the options being compared. We do not run paid placements inside editorial comparisons.
Corrections and updates
| Type of change | What we do |
|---|---|
| Factual error in an article | Corrected in place, and the last-updated date is moved. |
| Wrong answer key | Corrected in the live bank; the solution is rewritten to show the correct derivation. |
| Exam rule change at NCEES | Affected pages are found and updated together, so the site does not describe two different exams. |
| Outdated statistic | Replaced with the current figure and re-dated, or removed if no current figure exists. |
Related
- About PECivilClick — who builds this and why.
- Pass Guarantee terms — what the guarantee covers.
- Contact — report an error or ask a question.