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P R O F I L E
Decoupling and ethics Texas engineering industry takes center stage with big board vote, ongoing course enrollment for troubled engineers. The National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying coordinates best practices for testing and licensing. In 2013, the council voted to decouple the PE exam from the four-year experience requirement, opening the door for states to follow. / Donovan Brigham
By RICHARD MASSEY Managing Editor
A big reason for the change is that many engineers who have been in the field for years look at the PE exam as an obstacle, not an opportunity. Rather than take the test and become a PE, they simply keep working under the industrial exemption for companies, content to have someone else – a li- censed PE – sign off on documents and plans. Reflecting a national, if not universal, trend in the engineering industry, the Texas Board of Professional Engineers voted to “decouple” the PE exam from the four-year experience requirement. “We lose a number of candidates who never take the exam,” says Jerry Carter, CEO of the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Survey- ing, the industry’s central agency for best practices. See EXAM, page 4
R eflecting a national, if not universal, trend in the engineering industry, the Texas Board of Professional Engineers voted to “decouple” the PE exam from the four-year experience requirement. This means that a Texas engineer-in-training can take the test whenever he or she is ready – even if that engineer has only been out of school for a year or two. But in the event engineers take and pass the test early, they still must wait the entire four years before being officially licensed as a PE. While the change does not reduce the rigor of the PE exams, it does create new options for the test takers, as they can get the test out of the way long before they hang their own shingle, or are named principal at a firm. “Decoupling offers a more flexible timeline to ac- commodate different career and life paths of our future engineers,” says Daniel Wong, chairman of the Texas board.
THE ZWEIG LETTER March 28, 2016, ISSUE 1145
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