I teach 2/3rds of the PPI course so I'm super biased. I've heard good things about both courses and bad things about both, but have no personal experience with the Kaplan course. The PPI course is still new so we're figuring some things out; the biggest complaint we had was that we have too much information and homework, so we're looking to trim it down but some of that wont happen until the October SE exam. That said, most (if not all) of the takers last year had a positive experience and I got a number of people crediting passing the SE exam on the course. Probably the biggest advantage with the PPI course is it comes with all the typically used reference texts by PPI and has a passing "guarantee" where if you fail the exam you can retake the course at no additional cost (assuming you did all the homework and jumped through all of PPIs hoops).
Professional and Structural Engineer (ME, NH)
American Concrete Industries
I took the school of pe courses and found them very useful but you will need a decent amount of time to dedicate to them if your are taking both exams.
Thanks! TehMightyEngineer, how much time was generally needed on homework compared to class lectures? Are the PPI handouts pretty useful during the test...with flow charts for solving problems, etc. Like everyone else, I'm looking for the most efficient way to create my cookbook before I walk in for the test, not to mention doing a crap load of problem by hand before.
Probably 3:1 of average of homework hours to class time. I'm working on trimming the syllabus down to try to slightly reduce the amount of homework required but honestly people should be doing like 4:1 hours of problem solving and self-study to every hour of lecture.
In my opinion PPIs handouts from the lectures are not very useful during the exam. I would of course print some of them out and put them in notes I brought to the exam as I bet many of them are useful and they do a good job of reducing things down to bullet points and basic info, but they're almost exclusively made for studying. The other issue is as an instructor I will often write notes on the slides during the lecture but these notes aren't easily printed out (though I advise people to take their own notes).
I personally have made some handouts that I gave the course takers that I feel will help during the exam (and had multiple people tell me they did help) but otherwise the PPI review course is mostly focused on guiding studying and getting a foundation of knowledge, and less on helpful cheatsheet handouts to help you on exam day. I'm hoping to revise this somewhat in October but I'm not sure how much I can change PPI's lecture strategy.
Regardless, I try to make sure that everyone gets as much use out of the course as possible. So if there's something you'd like to see different during the course I will try to incorporate it.
Professional and Structural Engineer (ME, NH)
American Concrete Industries
I don't have that data nor enough info to make a reasonable guess. If I had to make an unreasonable guess I'd say it was similar to the NCEES pass rates and likely slightly better; but that's entirely based on my estimation of how well prepared everyone was during the review course.
Professional and Structural Engineer (ME, NH)
American Concrete Industries
