271828, my experience wasn't good either. The first afternoon problem was designing one bent of a steel building. I knew how to do everything, but there was no way I was going to come up with all the gravity loadings, environmental loadings, moment distribution and the code checks for this frame in 4 hours. I tried to pull a fast one by saying the bases were fixed and the beam to column connections were pinned since the problem never really gave end conditions (I knew what they intended, but hey I thought I would give it a shot and it made the analysis a snap). Well the grader didn't think I was too cute and flunked me. I called and argued several times, but finally gave up.
The second time I had a very easy problem, but left my Blodgett at home and didn't have any other reference material with me for designing openings in a steel web. I just took one look at the problem and turned the sheet in and went home. I can't remember the problem on the third test that I passed. Back then IRRC, the fee was only 100-200 dollars.
As far as taking the SEII without the SEI, that's exactly what I did in Arizona, they let the CE count as my SEI. I actually took the SEI after I passed the SEII. Like the fellow above said, you have to have both in Illinois.
