I'm a licensed surveyor in Texas and I sat for the RPLS exam last fall. I'd been working under a licensed surveyor for six years, so I had solid field experience, but the breadth of what the exam covers is genuinely wide. Passed on my first attempt with a 74%, which isn't a great score but it's a pass, and I want to be honest about where I struggled.
I spent five months preparing, averaging about two hours a day five days a week. The first three months I covered the core technical domains — boundary law, measurement and analysis, surveying mathematics, and photogrammetry. Boundary law was the heaviest lift for me because the Texas-specific content — Spanish and Mexican land grant system, riparian rights — goes pretty deep and it's not something we deal with daily at my office.
The last two months I shifted entirely to practice problems and timed sections. Math on the exam requires you to be fast and accurate — you don't have time to derive things from first principles under pressure. Traverse calculations, coordinate geometry, and error analysis problems need to feel automatic. I also spent dedicated time on the legal and professional responsibility content, which I'd underestimated when I first looked at the exam blueprint.
Five months at two hours a day sounds right. I did four months and passed at 71%. I think I could've scored higher with more time on the professional responsibility and ethics content — those questions are subtle and they show up more than you expect.
Boundary law is the section that separates the strong candidates from everyone else on this exam. Field experience helps but the legal principles — especially regarding senior vs. junior rights and ambiguity resolution — need to be studied explicitly. Experience won't fill those gaps.
The Texas land grant history content is no joke. I'd been practicing in Texas for eight years and still had to spend six weeks specifically on that section. It's tested more heavily than most study guides suggest.
Traverse calculations have to be automatic, agreed. I timed myself on 20-problem sets and kept going until I was consistently under 35 minutes with no errors. The exam doesn't reward slow accuracy — you need both.
Congrats on passing! The one thing that clicked for me was stopping trying to memorize formulas and actually working through problems until I understood why the formula existed. Sounds obvious, but I'd been just drilling the math without thinking about what I was solving for. Once I shifted to that, the boundary law and coordinate geometry stuff stopped feeling random.
Also don't underestimate the legal side. I wasn't expecting how much property law showed up and it caught me off guard the first few weeks of studying. Gave it way more time toward the end and it definitely helped. A 74% is a pass and that's all that matters honestly, good luck to anyone still grinding through it.
I failed my first attempt and honestly it wasn't even close. I'd been grinding practice questions for weeks but I was doing it completely wrong — I kept drilling the same topics I already knew because they felt comfortable. The real issue was I had massive blind spots in geodetic surveying and boundary law, and I didn't realize how heavily those get tested until I saw my score breakdown.
Second time around I forced myself to spend the first two months exclusively on my weak areas, even when it was painful and slow. I also stopped doing random practice questions and started working through problems by topic in a structured way so I could actually track where I was improving. Passed with an 81% on the second try. If you failed, don't just do more of the same thing — figure out exactly what tripped you up and attack that specifically.