Fundamentals of Surveying Exam Updates – July 2020

By NLC Support

It is hard to believe we are already halfway through 2020!

Since July has come and gone, the Fundamentals of Surveying exam has been updated. A lot of anxiety has been felt by FS test takers everywhere. The dreaded not knowing. Like you, I had no idea what to expect of the changes. We can take what NCEES tells us to be true, but until actual students have taken the exam, there was no real-world knowledge of the updated exam.

Let’s talk about the exam categories after July 2020. The first major change you may notice is the number of categories. Pre-July 2020, there were almost twice as many categories as the seven (7) you will see now. The reasoning behind this was to combine several of the categories together. They are still there, just nestled under a main category.

Let’s take a few minutes and go through the new categories. Category number 1 is Surveying Processes and methods. This category looks identical to the PS category “Instruments, GPS, Control Surveys, Topographic Surveys, and Construction Surveys”. This is a great topic, because knowing the foundation of data collection is especially important. Category 2 is kind of a new category for the Fundamentals Exam, “Mapping Processes and Methods.” Before this was a graphical communication section with questions such as scale and north arrows. With the new category, not only is mapping tested, but also photogrammetry. A better title may be Mapping and Photogrammetry Processes, but just know both are included.

“Boundary Law and Real Property Principles” is the title of category 3. Look at that, they took public land system, legal aspects, boundary law, and real property principles and combined them into one category! Not many questions were added to this category, but it still has 29 questions that make up this category. Brand new to the exam this year is the “Surveying Principles” category. But what doesn’t make sense is that this category isn’t just about surveying at all, its geodetic principles with other types of surveys mixed in. Horizontal and vertical surveys, historical surveying, and geodesy have all been forced to live together in one category.

For the fifth category, you will see a familiar category with Survey computations. This has always been a decent percentage of the Fundamentals of Surveying exam, but now it is even larger. If you have a preprogrammed HP35, you can breeze through this category and not give it a second thought.

Category six is a familiar one with project planning, safety, liability, contracts, and supervision. Interestingly enough, this category is very similar to a category on the PS exam, so expect to see this content again.

Last but not least is category seven, “Applied Mathematics and Statistics.” This is by far the biggest change to the FS exam for the 2020 update. No longer is the exam heavily mathematically tested. You will still see quantitative reasoning, measurement science, probability and statistics, and a very small portion of trigonometry, geometry, and calculus. The number of math questions on the exam have been slashed in half and this is the biggest change to the FS exam for 2020.