110 questions. 5 hours 20 minutes. Two sections with the one-way submit, the 25-minute scheduled break, and the on-screen chrome you'll meet at Pearson VUE. Finish the FE practice exam and you get a pacing report showing exactly where your time went.
No credit card. The 8-question diagnostic needs no account; the full-length FE practice exam asks for one when you book your slot.
questions, full length
on the real clock
per question budget
to sit your first one
Which exam are you sitting?
NCEES splits the FE into 7 disciplines and you sit exactly one. Question banks finished so far: 1 of 7. The rest are listed with where they actually stand, not with a launch date we cannot keep.
110 questions · 5h20m
110 questions · 5h20m
110 questions · 5h20m
110 questions · 5h20m
110 questions · 5h20m
110 questions · 5h20m
110 questions · 5h20m
The problem
Most people who fail the FE knew the material. The NCEES numbers are blunt. First-time takers pass at 61–69%. Retakers pass at 25–37%. What collapses between those two attempts is rarely knowledge.
It is the only reference you get, Ctrl+F is switched off, and you have to use the left-side search box. Candidates burn whole minutes scrolling. It is the most-cited reason people run out of time.
110 questions in 5 hours 20 minutes. Most failures are not a topic you never learned — they are the question that ate four minutes and never got abandoned.
Pass rates fall from about 71% within a year of graduating to 63% after that. Three years into a job, Statics is further away than it feels.
Untimed problem sets teach you the method. They do not teach you to survive a two-section sitting with a break in the middle and no way back to Section 1.
How it works
Rehearse, diagnose, drill. Three steps around one full-length FE practice exam. The first is free, and stays free.
A full 110-question, 5h20m FE practice exam assembled fresh against the NCEES blueprint — every knowledge area inside its official item-count range. Numbered items step through their variants, so the values move between sittings and the method has to be run again.
Not just “Fluids is weak”. Fluids is costing you 4.1 minutes a question, these eleven items are your time sinks, and abandoning each at three minutes would have bought back the clock for the four you never reached.
The report builds the queue for you. Time-sink drills with fresh numbers, and timed handbook lookups: find where a term lives in your own copy of the handbook, against the clock.
What you get
Built for the way the FE actually fails people. We do not sell lectures. We sell the FE practice exam and the diagnosis that comes out of it.
Two sections with an irreversible mid-exam submit. The real 25-minute scheduled break, clock genuinely paused. Flag for review, the colour-coded navigator, the end-of-section review screen, answer strikethrough. Close the tab by accident and all of it comes back.
Seconds on every question, every attempt. The report sorts them into four buckets — time sinks, slow and wrong, rushed wrong, and left blank — with every threshold stated, and the misses and time sinks go straight into your review queue.
Not just the worked solution. Each distractor carries the specific mistake that lands on it — inverted the ratio, used the radius, left the unit conversion out — because knowing why the answer you picked was wrong is what stops you picking it again.
Questions are authored as parameterised templates, so the numbers re-roll and the method has to be run again — consecutive papers step through a template's variants rather than redrawing at random. The exception is the eighty-eight authored items — fifty ethics scenarios and thirty-eight concept questions: a question about accepting a gift from a supplier has no numbers to change, so those recur. A few numeric templates recur sooner too: where the realistic values are few — a steel's yield strain, a count of cement sacks — the distinct variants run out first.
Raw correct out of 110 on the paper you sat, next to the pacing buckets that produced it — time sinks, slow and wrong, rushed wrong, left blank — with every threshold stated. It is not a pass prediction: NCEES does not publish a raw cut score and we have no outcome data to calibrate against. When we do, we will say so and show the sample size.
Every confirmed defect, dated, with what changed and how long the fix took. There is a report link on every question in the runner and beside every worked solution. A prep product with no errata page has either no users or no honesty.
Where we sit
An honest comparison — we will tell you where we lose. Free banks are real value, and at least one $25 competitor ships more questions than we do.
| Capability | Free banks | $25–$120 banks | $400–$2,995 courses | AceFEExam |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free full-length timed FE practice exam | No | No | No | Yes, every 30 days — account and a booked slot |
| Full-length mocks included | None — no timer at all | Zero to a handful | Usually two, at every tier | Unlimited on the paid tier, stepped variants |
| Per-question pacing analytics | No | Rare | No — accuracy only | Yes — the core of the product |
| Handbook lookup practice | No | Almost never | No | Yes — timed drill, paid tier |
| NCEES diagnostic report import | No | One does it | Only on a sales call | Yes — on Complete |
| Video lectures and live classes | No | No | Yes — this is what you pay for | No — we do not sell a course |
| Typical price | $0 | $25–$120 | $400–$2,995 | $59–$99 one-time |
Comparison reflects public pricing and feature pages as verified in August 2026. We still lose the video-lecture row, and at least one $25 bank ships more questions than we do — a comparison where the author wins every row is an advert. If we have something wrong, tell us and we will date the correction.
Pricing
Less than half the $225 NCEES retake fee — and you only get one attempt per quarter.
Enough to find out whether you are ready.
forever, no card
The full drill loop for a normal run-up to exam day.
one-time · 90 days of access
Covers FE Civil. One discipline per purchase.
The whole run-up, plus the remedy if exam day goes wrong.
one-time · 12 months of access
Covers FE Civil. One discipline per purchase.
No auto-renewal. The price shown is the total you pay, and the access period is right next to it.
30-day refund, no questions, no completion thresholds, no practice-average gate, no video-watch percentage. On top of that, on Complete: sit the exam after your purchase, fail, and import the NCEES diagnostic while your Complete access is still running, and you get another 12 months plus the Retake Rescue plan. The cash refund is time-boxed and the fail remedy is product rather than cash — we would rather say that plainly than hide it in terms.
Read the guarantee in full, including its limitsStraight answers
The exam itself
Every number below comes from NCEES and links back to it. Where we and they disagree, they are right.
110 questions, offered year round at Pearson VUE centres for a $225 fee. The appointment runs six hours: two minutes of nondisclosure agreement, an eight-minute tutorial, 5 hours 20 minutes of exam, and a 25-minute scheduled break. That break splits the paper in two, and submitting the first section is one-way. Items are drawn from 14 knowledge areas and 79 sub-topics, each area carrying its own minimum and maximum count — and those bounds sum to more than 110, so no two compliant papers split the same way.
Pass or fail, and NCEES does not publish the passing score. There is no deduction for a wrong answer, so a blank costs exactly what a guess costs — never leave one. Nothing is curved: NCEES sets no predetermined share of examinees who should pass. Your raw correct count becomes a scaled score that absorbs minor difficulty differences between exam forms, and first-time and repeat takers are held to the same standard.
NCEES republishes first-time pass rates every January and July. FE Civil stands at 66% across 6,247 examinees in the July 2026 update, the second-largest FE cohort after Mechanical. Repeat takers pass at 25–37%, and the collapse between those two numbers is rarely knowledge — the retaker has already studied the material once. Distance from school costs too: about 71% within a year of graduating, against 63% after that.
None of your own paper. NCEES supplies the FE Reference Handbook and every specified design standard on screen, and it is the only reference permitted — with Ctrl+F disabled, so you search it through the sidebar box. Calculators must come off the NCEES approved list, which is short and model-specific: certain Casio, Hewlett Packard and Texas Instruments models, and nothing else. You get one attempt per testing window, and no more than three in any 12 months.
One full-length FE practice exam from now — five hours and twenty minutes — you will know whether you are ready, and if you are not, exactly which minutes are costing you.
No card. The eight-question diagnostic needs no account.
