Testing for Competency - the Professional Engineering Examination

The Principals and Practice of Engineering Examination (PE Exam) is one of the requirements for professional licensure. It is a nationwide exam used to ensure that licensed PE’s are “minimally competent”.  Anne Bertelsmann, Ph.D., PE, (chair of the NCEES volunteer committee that prepares the Chemical PE Exam) will discuss the purpose of the PE Exam and the steps taken to ensure its validity. The presentation will start with an overview of the available discipline exams and a closer look at the content of the Chemical PE Exam  and then move on to exam scoring. It will be shown how statistical analysis of the responses can indicate the ability of a question to measure competency. If you are concerned about “trick questions” on the exam or have ever wondered why it takes weeks to get a result for a computer scored exam, this talk will provide some answers.