Preparing for the INCOSE Systems Engineering Professional (SEP) Certification Knowledge Exam

By Courtney Wright , CSEP, Certification Program Manager?

Preparing for the INCOSE knowledge exam? Or just wondering what it’s like? Future, current, and past Systems Engineering Professionals (SEPs) of all levels are welcome to take the?practice exam?now offered by INCOSE’s online exam provider.?

The practice exam is unproctored, which means you won’t get the full exam experience, nor will you pay the full cost associated with bringing in another human to watch you. It is a great chance to interact with online exam questions. This is the first new set of sample questions the certification program has published since 2015, and they follow the new format used for the exam questions. These questions all have four options to choose from, and only one of them is right. These replace the much-hated multiple-selection questions.?

The practice exam is only 20 questions long, compared to the standard exam that has 100 scored questions. The standard computer exam also has 20 unscored questions, for a total of 120 questions. Those unscored questions are new questions we are trying out to see how well they correlate with candidates who pass the exam. The practice questions are the rejects from the unscored questions. These questions may have been too hard, too easy, or too similar to existing questions.?

On the actual exam, we have a detailed recipe of how many questions we pull from each important topic in the handbook. We don’t publish that recipe, but we do list the ingredients in the form of the Learning Objectives flyer. The practice exam questions are like the leftover ingredients, and the number of practice questions on each topic is not representative of how many questions are on that topic in the scored exams.?

The practice exam costs $10 for each attempt. We only have a single bank of 20 questions, with an update planned for late 2024. We do not store your results. Unlike on the scored exam, you will be shown your score. On the standard exam, you are only told if you passed or failed.?

If you are currently a SEP, you are banned from taking the actual, scored exam. But you are welcome to take the practice exam! Its questions are from the hybrid exam, meaning the answers are found in both the Fourth and Fifth Edition of the handbook. We’ll continue testing on the hybrid exam until at least the end of 2024. We expect to release a new set of practice questions around the same time we transition to the Fifth Edition exam.?

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