For the next 10 weeks STAY THE HELL OFF PPI.COM. I so wish someone had told me that when I took the test. Nothing good came from daily reviews of people agonizing over question 22 and others saying stupid things like "56/80 is
always passing" when the passing score changes for every test. There are always a number of questions that are deemed to be ambiguous and are thrown out. A number of questions that turn out to have two valid answers and are rescored. The remainder is then bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated until a passing score is finally determined. The process is pretty awful at NCESS, and the participants in ppi.com (and the other PE boards) will always make crap up in the total absence of information.
Mark your calendar for February 1, 2013 to go back to ppi.com and see if you should have gotten your results yet (people will start posting "I got my results" threads sometime late in January), the NCESS results go to all the states at the same time, but each state has the ability/obligation? to review the results for their state and they all take their own sweet time to accomplish that review. As I understand it, the passing score from NCESS is just a guideline and the states can adjust it up or down (the year I took it there were two guys going back and forth on ppi.com about a score in one state being passing and a (slightly higher) score in another state being failing, I got bored with the whole discussion before there was any resolution and they both might have been lying, a lot of that goes on at ppi.com).
David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering
"Belief" is the acceptance of an hypotheses in the absence of data.
"Prejudice" is having an opinion not supported by the preponderance of the data.
"Knowledge" is only found through the accumulation and analysis of data.