The following article appears in the journal JOM, 47 (4) (1995), p. 77. JOM is a publication of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society

Coming Soon—An EIT for Metallurgists?

Editor's Note: This is the second article in a three-part series concerning professional registration for metallurgical engineers. The first article appeared in the March 1995 issue of JOM.

Taking and passing the metallurgical Professional Engineer (PE) exam produced by the Professional Registration Committee of TMS is merely the last step in the process by which metallurgists become registered professional engineers. One of the first steps is the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) examination produced by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES). This test, usually taken by seniors in undergraduate engineering programs, is commonly known as the EIT because passing it allows a candidate to be designated as an "engineer in training." It's general format has been unchanged for several years; however, a major change in its structure is looming, which could have significant consequences for engineering education in general and possibly the disciplines of materials and metallurgical engineering.

The FE exam in its present form is a day-long examination consisting of two parts, generally known as the morning session and the afternoon session. The morning session consists of 140 multiple-choice problems divided among ten subjects common to most engineering disciplines (e.g., mathematics, electrical circuits, fluid mechanics, materials science). The afternoon session consists of 70 more complex multiple-choice problems in five subjects—engineering mechanics, applied mathematics, electrical circuits, engineering economics, and thermodynamics/fluid mechanics. The two sections count equally toward a candidate's overall score. The FE exam, in this form, is designed to measure a candidate's skills with general engineering subjects. The exam does not, however, measure a candidate's knowledge of the subjects taught in his or her particular major (e.g., there are no soils questions for civil engineers or well-logging questions for petroleum engineers). This is seen as a drawback to the exam, increasingly so since the FE is being considered as an assessment tool in various quality-control plans for engineering education.

As a result, the NCEES recently announced a change in the format for future FE examinations. The new exam will feature a morning session similar to that presently used, but would replace the afternoon session with a 40-question, discipline-specific exam featuring questions pertinent to a candidate's major field of study. Such discipline-specific FE exams are currently being planned for chemical, civil, electrical, industrial, and mechanical engineering. For candidates not majoring in one of these five fields, a sixth afternoon-session exam in general engineering will be used, with questions taken from the same group of undergraduate subjects as those used for the morning session. The new format will most likely debut in 1996 or 1997.

The new FE format will not contain a discipline-specific exam for materials/metallurgy or other smaller disciplines such as mining and petroleum engineering. There are, however, reasons for eventually wanting to include a materials-oriented FE exam, including:

• Program assessment. If university chemical, civil, and mechanical engineering departments will be subject to external assessment procedures, then it is likely that materials/metallurgical engineering departments will be, too. As a result, an assessment tool will be needed.

• Fairness to FE candidates in our discipline. It stands to reason that civil engineering candidates will tend to perform better on a civil engineering FE exam than materials engineering candidates will on the general engineering exam. As a result, new engineers in our field may find it more difficult to complete the registration process.

• Participation in the FE exam among candidates majoring in materials/metallurgical engineering is relatively low (about 200 per year). This may, in part, be due to a feeling of students that the FE exam in its present format is less oriented toward this field of engineering than others, and thus not worth the trouble of taking. A discipline-specific FE exam might make the registration process more attractive.

First, a materials-oriented FE exam would require the writing of several hundred questions, not just for the exam itself but for the related study guides that would have to be produced. In addition, a reference guide containing the appropriate information and tables needed for the exam would also have to be produced since the FE is now conducted using a single NCEES-supplied reference text. Since it is likely that TMS will have to perform these functions, the initial load on the society's Professional Registration Committee would be enormous. Once the exam were in place, TMS would continue to be responsible for writing new questions for the FE exam in addition to its present task of creating and monitoring the metallurgical PE exam. It is not certain that the personnel are presently available to accomplish both tasks.

Second, materials and metallurgical engineering is a highly diverse field with a wide variety of educational practices; putting together a 40-problem discipline-specific FE exam that satisfied all constituencies and gave all candidates a reasonable chance of passing would be difficult at best. Furthermore, the complaint would almost immediately be heard that TMS was attempting to dictate the content of materials/metallurgical education programs through the makeup of the exam.

Last, several materials-oriented departments currently have their own devices for measuring student performance; such methods are considered more appropriate than one that an external group could devise. The pressure to hew to some unofficial national standard as an educational assessment tool would be widely resisted.

At this point, the question of developing a materials-oriented FE exam module is on hold while the NCEES completes the process of developing and administering discipline-specific modules in the larger areas of engineering. Whether TMS would wish to involve itself in joining this trend remains an open question.

For more information on the Metallurgical Engineering PE Exam, contact Vicki Koebnick at TMS, 184 Thorn Hill Road, Warrendale, Pennsylvania 15086; (724) 776-9000, ext. 226; fax (724) 776-3770; e-mail koebnick@tms.org.