The FE Reference Handbook for civil candidates

Getting it, and the version question

Where: your MyNCEES account, free. In the exam the current version is on screen, and you cannot bring a copy of your own.

Study with the copy from your account, not a file from a search result: download sites carry older versions, and the exam uses the current one. This page names no version number for the same reason. Practice routines with the PDF and the on-screen search: FE Reference Handbook.

Civil sections and where to look

Chapter titles below are the ones NCEES uses in its own Handbook errata notices. For sections whose chapter title we could not confirm from an NCEES source, we give search terms instead of a chapter name.

• Geotechnical, Transportation, Water Resources: the Civil Engineering chapter. NCEES errata place the surface water hydrologic budget, the Greenshields traffic model and slope-stability definitions there.
• Structural and Construction: search by term, for example "fixed-end", "buckling", "earned value" or "float".
• Water treatment and water quality: the Environmental Engineering chapter (fate and transport, for example). On the civil exam these are part of the Water Resources section.
• Mechanics of Materials: the chapter of that name, which has fixed-end moment diagrams and the principle of superposition, both used for civil beams.
• Materials: Materials Science/Structure of Matter for general properties; for concrete and asphalt, search the term, such as "water-cement" or "air voids".
• Dynamics: the chapter of that name.
• Mathematics and Statistics: the Mathematics and Engineering Probability and Statistics chapters.
• Units: Units and Conversion Factors, the first stop when a problem mixes ft and m or lb and N.
• Statics, Fluid Mechanics, Engineering Economics, Ethics, Surveying: search by the term itself, for example "centroid", "moment of inertia", "Bernoulli", "capitalized cost", "latitude" or "departure".

Searching it in the exam

Search runs through the box beside the PDF, so the words you type decide what you find. Names of equations and methods work better than symbols:

• Geotechnical: "effective stress", "consolidation", "Rankine", "bearing capacity".
• Structural: "fixed-end", "superposition", "buckling", "deflection".
• Water resources: "Manning", "Hazen", "rational", "hydrograph".
• Transportation: "Greenshields", "sight distance", "vertical curve", "superelevation".
• Construction: "earned value", "float", "productivity".

Learn where each chapter starts before the exam, because a term that appears in three chapters returns three sets of hits.

What is not in it

The FE supplies no design standards: no ACI 318, no AISC Steel Construction Manual, no AASHTO Green Book. You get the Handbook’s equations and tables and nothing else. The PE Civil is different: there, design standards are supplied on screen, so a PE-oriented code library is no help on the FE.

Units

Units: SI + USCS. Several Handbook equations carry a unit constant, Manning’s equation the best known, so check which form you are reading before you plug in numbers. Section pages list the unit traps for each area: water resources, geotechnical, structural.