FE Mechanical Pass Rate, Format & Study Guide

The certifying body does not publicly publish an official pass rate for this exam. Be wary of third-party sites citing a specific number here — treat any pass-rate claim you see elsewhere for this exam as unverified.

NCEES limits every FE exam (all disciplines, Mechanical included) to one attempt per testing window, with a maximum of 3 attempts in any rolling 12-month period. Testing windows run quarterly (January-March, April-June, July-September, October-December), so at minimum you're waiting for the next window to open before retesting — there's no same-window retake regardless of how early you fail.

NCEES grades on raw correct answers only (no penalty for wrong answers), then converts that to a scaled score to normalize for minor difficulty differences between exam forms — confirmed directly on NCEES's own exam-scoring page. Critically, NCEES does not publish the passing score or the number of correct answers needed; it states explicitly there's no predetermined percentage of examinees who should pass or fail. Results are reported as Pass or Did Not Pass only — no numeric score is given to examinees who pass, though those who don't pass get a diagnostic breakdown by subject area.

110 questions in 5 hours 20 minutes of actual exam time works out to roughly 3 minutes per question, though NCEES expects some questions to take seconds and others several minutes, so practicing under real time pressure matters as much as content mastery. NCEES's own FE Mechanical specification lists 14 knowledge areas as question-count RANGES rather than fixed percentages, so build your study plan from the official NCEES exam specification rather than a guessed weighting, and since you get only 3 attempts per year, treat your first sitting as the one to be genuinely ready for rather than a low-stakes trial run.