Big Changes Are Coming to the Texas RPLS Exam! 2020 Update

By NLC Support

Becoming a Texas Registered Professional Land Surveyor (RPLS) is not an easy task!

I was hired as a Professional Assistant Professor by Texas A&M Corpus Christi in August 2015 to teach basically all of the land surveying courses. My colleagues, GIS and remote sensing experts, were not enjoying trying to instruct classes such as legal aspects of surveying, and they needed someone to compliment the surveying – GIS – photogrammetry curriculum within the Geospatial Surveying Engineering bachelors’ program. As part of the position contract, I was required to obtain my Texas RPLS within 12 months of beginning as a professor.

As someone that was already licensed in multiple states, I was accustomed to (1) completing an application with the Board, (2) transmitting my NCEES Record to the Board which included the scores for my Fundamentals of Surveying and Principles & Practice of Surveying exam scores, and (3) studying for the exam. But to my surprise, Texas did not require the Principles & Practice of Surveying exam. Instead, Texas only required the Fundamentals of Surveying exam (6 hours) plus the state-specific Texas RPLS exam (4 hours). First time Texas RPLS applicants were required to take the Fundamentals of Surveying exam (6 hours) plus the full state-specific Texas RPLS exam (8 hours!).

Texas is the only state in the country that does not require the Principles & Practice of Surveying exam.

But why? There are a variety of reasons including the sole focus of the Texas Board of Surveying on boundary surveying subject matter, forget about adjustments, FGDC standards, or ALTA surveys, and also the opinion of the RPLS Exam Committee that Texas is just too different in terms of history and laws to require Future RPLS’s to take a national exam. Personally, I don’t think Texas surveying is substantially different than other states, but we all know the terms of art used to described individual’s opinions.

In a major surprise, the Governor of Texas decided to merge the Board of Surveying with the Board of Engineering in September 2019. Today, the surveying profession is regulated under the joint Texas Board of Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors. These kinds of mergers have gone very poorly in other states but Dr. Lance Kinney, the joint Board’s director, really does care about surveying and has been, in my opinion, a great leader of surveying regulation so far.

Major changes in 2019 were the joint Board merger as well as the lowering of the education requirement to become a Texas RPLS from a bachelors to an associate degree. More on that in a different article. Further changes to the Board rules were proposed in August 2020. I will not go into every change, but the most striking is the requirement that every RPLS applicant will be required to take and pass the Principles & Practice of Surveying exam as of January 2021. After that date, Texas exam requirements will be substantially similar to the other 49 states in that applicants must pass the FS exam, PS exam, and state-specific exam.

How exactly will this play out? No one knows until the Board implements the (now proposed but likely to pass) rules. How long will the Texas exam be? Probably 4 hours. How will the Texas exam be given to students due to the COVID circus? No public information is available. Will the new Texas exam be similar to the current 4-hour reciprocal exam? Probably, but no public information is available. This has been a crazy year for the Texas surveying exam due to all the pandemic-related cancellations but I’m hopeful that Dr. Kinney and the Board will chart a path that at least partially alleviates the surveyor shortage in the Lone Star State.