Failed the FE exam? What to do next

An FE fail comes with two things from NCEES: the word fail, and a diagnostic report. Nothing else — no score to appeal, no list of the questions you missed. That is less than it feels like you should get, but the report is enough to plan a retake properly, and the rules on when you can sit again are simpler than most forum threads make them sound.

What NCEES gives you, and what it does not

• A result of pass or fail. NCEES reports every FE result that way, usually within 7–10 business days, and does not publish the passing score, because it varies slightly from one exam form to another.
• A diagnostic report. Examinees who do not pass get one. For each knowledge area it shows how many items the area had, your performance as a scaled score from 0 to 15, and a bar comparing you with the average of the examinees who passed.
• Not your questions or answers. NCEES does not give examinees their exam questions or answers, and it does not manually re-check answers on computer-based exams.
• Not a curve. NCEES scores each exam with no predetermined share of examinees who should pass or fail, and grades first-time and repeat takers to the same standard. The standard you missed did not move because of who else sat that week.

The first week: six things, in order

1. 1

   Save the diagnostic report from your MyNCEES account. It is the only feedback this attempt will give you, and you will want to compare it with the next one — NCEES scales the 0–15 scores partly so that an examinee can compare results across attempts.

2. 2

   Work out the earliest date you can sit again. NCEES allows one attempt per testing window, and the windows are the calendar quarters: fail in May and the next window opens on 1 July.

3. 3

   Check your licensing board's own rules. NCEES says some boards are more restrictive than its policy, and some require their own application and fee before you can sit an NCEES exam.

4. 4

   Turn the report into an order. Copy each area's bar into the free retake planner. It ranks the areas by how many questions they carry as well as by how far short you were, which is how NCEES's own sample reading of a report does it. Open the free retake planner

5. 5

   Choose the date from the work, not the calendar. The planner shows how many practice questions a week a given date implies. Book the date you can keep up with, not just the first one available.

6. 6

   Change how you practise, not only how much. Practise on the clock — 110 questions in 5 hours 20 minutes is under three minutes each — and practise finding things in the searchable FE Reference Handbook, which NCEES supplies on screen during the exam. How the FE Reference Handbook behaves during the exam

What a fail does and does not tell you

It tells you that your result on that form was below the passing standard. The diagnostic report tells you roughly where: NCEES says areas well short of the passing average contributed to the fail, and areas near or just above it can still be improved. It does not tell you how many questions you got right — NCEES says the scaled scores cannot be turned back into that — and it cannot be used to work out the passing score.

The FE diagnostic report, explained

What a retake costs

Each registration pays the full NCEES exam fee, which is $225 for the FE, and your board may add a fee of its own. Once you are approved to test you have 12 months to sit; a registration you neither use nor cancel in that time forfeits the fee.

Retaking the FE: the rules, the fee and the timing