PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast
The Fundamentals of Geology (Exam)
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This week we take on the FG test — the Fundamentals of Geology exam — the very first step on the road to becoming a professionally licensed geologist. Jesse just sat the exam this past fall (yes, a geology professor going back to take Geology 101), and we get into exactly what that was like: the nerves, the cram sessions, and the very real fear of an embarrassing fail.
We break down what's actually on the ASBOG FG exam — 110 multiple-choice questions across eight content domains, from general and field geology to hydrogeology, engineering geology, mineralogy, structure, and economic geology — and which sections scared us the most (looking at you, Darcy's law and soil mechanics). We talk through why university programs prepare students so differently, why the exam exists in the first place, and how we'd study for it if we only had two weeks.
Then we put it all to the test: Josh takes on a round of real and AI-generated practice questions live on the mic, and we share our honest take on using tools like Claude to build your own study guide. Whether you're a student staring down the FG exam, a geologist heading back to the field after years away, or just curious how much a PhD really remembers, this one's for you.
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Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you. Dr. Josh. Hey man. Hello, hello, uh Professor Professor Rymanck.
SPEAKER_01What's uh what's happening, man? Um not much actually. I mean, um to be honest, I'm just happy to be in a t-shirt today. I mean it's hot. It's hot in Montreal. That's good. Feels must feel good. Some green is showing up, little flowers. I mean, the life is life is good.
SPEAKER_00Life is good, yeah. It's not too hot. It's not too hot hot for your Welsh uh heritage, though. I know you get too hot quite quick. I mean I burn. I burn very, very quick. Yeah. You gotta keep away from that nasty sun. Yeah, it's dangerous. It's dangerous for us Welsh. It is. How do you feel in general? We're gonna talk about the FG test, which is the first test, the fundamentals of geology test. And how are you feeling? We are probably what this is the third episode in our PGO series. How are you feeling uh about this whole exercise of the professional licensure so far?
SPEAKER_01For me, I mean it I find it really enlightening, I guess. I mean uh uh it's a little motivating as well to uh to kind of uh understand it a little bit more and to understand why it's important, what the point of it is, I suppose, for both like a geologist and uh the kind of community at large. I mean, I find that really uh really uh cool. And I'm actually that geology is uh I mean considered important and that it's like uh they want to uh I mean the idea is to try and create a kind of base level that everybody has. I mean, there's so many different universities teaching different I mean, you know what it's like. We're we're not kind of given any guidance on what we should teach.
SPEAKER_00No, yeah, so every university kind of does their own own version, and do you inherit it from the department and the department every once in a while, every generation, the department kind of changes its strategy a little bit, but it's a slow-moving process. Yeah. I I've noticed since we've been kind of thinking about this. I mean, it's going on a year or more for me, thinking about this process. And um, and uh what I've I've noticed, I've I've taken a lot more note of when people have like on their LinkedIn profile, when it says PGO, I notice that more. And I I'm starting to like track who has like what types of people. Uh yeah, ooh, ooh, I want that. No, yeah, just like what types of people, what types of jobs they have, how it's useful uh out in the world to them, how that licensure process is actually more useful. Um so yeah, it's it's super interesting. I'm excited to continue on with this, and I hope it's useful for students. So the FG test, this is going to be a little US-centric because this is the the Asbog Association of the State Board of Geologists. We talked to Keith Rapp about that, past president of Asbog, about this exam and the PG exam, but this is the one that students take right out of undergrad, or ideally, they would take it right out of undergrad. And the idea here is fundamentals of geology. It's a wide-ranging test. I just took this this fall, this FG test. Um, you know, it's a, I think it's a three-hour block, maybe a bit longer than that. It's 110 questions covering a lot of different stuff. And so we're gonna center this discussion on a little bit of a personal experience of the FG test. Like, what is it? What did I find useful studying for it? My struggles are will will not be the same as most students because I'm a geology professor, right? And we have this super niche. So, like what I found difficult about the test might not be that applicable to other people, but I think just having a conversation about it. And I'm curious to hear your advice, your thoughts, Josh, and what your advice would be to students as we go through this.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, I would be also a bit uh nervous to take a test straight away, to be honest.
SPEAKER_00I know. I also thought, like, if I fail this, that's quite an embed that's quite embarrassing. I can't you can't fail it. You know, you can't can you claim to be a geology professor in teaching the intro-level stuff if you don't do well on this uh this FG exam? I probably not.
SPEAKER_01You'd have to not tell anybody and then take it again very quick.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's exactly right. That's what I thought, dude. So um, yeah, I think uh that this is the way, and uh many states require licensure, as we've talked about before, maybe about half, a little over half in the U.S. Some colleges, some universities, their course core curriculum requires there's like a capstone class that is a FG prep class. And some universities even have students take that FG exam, um, the springtime version. You kind of sign up for it and you you actually apply to take it, you know, give the licensing board your credentials and then say, okay, you're approved to take this test. Show up at this testing clinic. I think there's a couple days in the fall and a couple days in the spring every year that you can take it. So you got to plan ahead for this thing. And some universities force students to do that by way of a capstone class in the geology major. Uh, many don't. So it's something that I've been learning about, and we'll talk to some people who who teach those capstone classes, I think, hopefully, in this interview series. So, Josh, is it similar in Canada? Like, well, how does how does UCAM, the university you're at, the University of Quebec at Montreal, do you have any classes that are kind of tailored to the professional geologist or structure or the testing in any way? Yes. You do we do.
SPEAKER_01We have um well, we're just kind of in the middle of rearranging our undergrad program. Oh, good. Oh, it's interesting. Okay. But right now and and then also for the future, we have it's called a schemen model. It's like a a kind of a direction in the undergrad. You can you can kind of follow this uh list of courses um with certain obligatory courses. And if you do that at the end, you will have done everything, you'll have you'll have met all of the course requirements for the professional geology association.
SPEAKER_00Oh, so then your package, when you sub submit it, you would be able to take the licensing test right away.
SPEAKER_01I mean and you won't have to do any more courses. Because actually, uh for uh Canada at least, um the exact courses that you took and the syllabus for those particular courses is really important for becoming a PJ.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think to my and and correct me where I'm wrong here, but from our experience at the University of Alberta, just going through the undergrad curriculum, we we TA'd a ton of classes. I mean, I TA'd, what did I TA? In my five years there, I TA'd mineralogy one, mineralogy two, igneous igneous petrology, metamorphic petrology, those were distinct classes. I TA'd field school, I taught a pre cam, like an elective precameron geology, but there was way more required classes in the undergrad curriculum in geo for geology in Canada than most U.S. universities. I mean, in in my undergrad, smaller boats college, kind of the upper end of up other side of the spectrum. I had one class that was petrology, that was sedimentary igneous metamorphic. So we spent a third of the semester on each of those rock types. Whereas in Alberta, there were two classes on sedimentary petrology. There was one class on igneous, one class on metamorphic, so just a way deeper fundamental knowledge. And that was due to the accreditation process. In order to, that was kind of tailoring students to get the professional licensure process. Much more like engineering programs are in the United States. They're they're really targeting that PNG degree and and to get accredited in that way.
SPEAKER_01So imagine it's a bit like that in Penn State. You've you've got I mean, for us, we have three a geology major has three uh courses that they don't have to take in our department. It's basically full degree. Yeah, everything else is in your department.
SPEAKER_00No, for Penn State, Penn State is a much more uh sort of modular degree. There's there's few required classes. Um they're in mostly in the 200 level, a few in the 300 level, and then there's field camp, but we don't have an igneous petrology class. We don't have a metal, they're all kind of lumped together in one class that's only offered because one of my colleagues built his own advanced petrology class. It's not really advanced petrology, it's metamorphic and igneous together, but it's you know, billed as advanced petrology because it's it's better than the the I think it's Earth Materials 200 level, like rocks and minerals class. So that we have a lot more classes in the three and four hundred levels that are built by individual faculty members in their specialties. Um, so students get a a pretty broad exposure, but they don't get a a really strict fundamental exposure.
SPEAKER_01So you think, based on that, would you be more worried about a uh an Penn State student or like a different liberal art college student taking this FG test?
SPEAKER_00It's a great question. I don't actually know. I thought about this as we go through uh as I was going through this. I don't actually know. I'd be very curious to know how Penn State students would do. And I, you know, I I've been talking to my research group about taking this FG exam, and and I think several of them will. Um so I'll be very curious to know how they do. I think we do do a pretty we amongst those classes, you know, even though they're not like named igneous petrology, they get like they get insight into a lot of this stuff and and especially like the fundamentals. We do really good geophysics. We have a really good undergrad program. It's just not as structured, I think, as as at least Alberta. And I'm just comparing it to Alberta, it's structured much more like my undergrad degree was, um, except you have a lot more options in the 300-400 level to take to kind of go your in a direction you're you're interested in. So, yes, I think the answer is I think Penn State students would do pretty well on the FG exam, but I'd be curious to to follow it up because we we do have a very good undergrad program. It's just not it's just more modular, I think. More students can tailor it a little bit more to their interest than Alberta, where you kind of I mean, I don't know how many prereqs or how many options they had of like optionality. There wasn't a lot of optionality in the undergrad curriculum in Alberta, and I'd imagine it sounds like UCAM's kind of the same. It's the same, it's basically okay. Yeah, which is nice in some ways, and it's it's um, you know, there's downsides, it's just pros and cons. So with that, let's just cover, I'm gonna phrase this as a question, Josh. I'm gonna go through and say in the FG exam, there's a lot of different topics or uh sort of categories of stuff. There's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight of them. I'm gonna list them in their proportions on the FG exam of the proportions of questions. I'm gonna ask you which ones are the scariest. Which ones would you be most scared of? Okay. And I think I have a guess at this, but I'm not sure. Um, all right, so the categories are general and field geology, that's 17% of the exam. Geomorph, surficial quaternary, those are all kind of lumped into one, 14%. Hydrogeology, 13%, mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry, 12%, structured tectonics, seismology, 12%, engineering geology, 12%, sedimentary, stratigraphy, paleo, 11%, and then economic and energy geology is is the smallest, and it's 9%. So general field geology, geomorph, hydrology, mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry, structured tectonic seismology, engineering geology, sedimentary, stratigraphy, paleo, and economic geology. Which one would worry you the most? And the second and third most, do you think?
SPEAKER_01Hydro for sure. Hydro for sure.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01I would I don't think I don't know if I would be able to answer any questions. Zero questions. Zero questions. So I'd have to do well in the other parts.
SPEAKER_00What is an aquifer? Oh, yeah. Uh let me think about that. Yeah, okay. All right, and what about the second most?
SPEAKER_01Second most. I would imagine something like engineering geology. Yeah. Probably. I mean, because that's things like soil and rock mechanics. And I mean I don't know very much about that at all. Yeah. Um, and like kind of surface processes, surface interactions, I suppose. I I don't I don't know too much about that. And then maybe also energy geology. I don't know very much about that.
SPEAKER_00Oh, is that right? Okay. I would have thought that that one would be you'd be generally okay at. I mean, just because you know, geochronology, you're exposed to a lot of or deposit type thinking with the tools you use a bit.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm yeah, I'm not sure which is worse. I mean, uh that maybe seismology. I don't know much about that.
SPEAKER_00It's surprising. There's no zircon uranium-led geochronology section here. There should be a real whole section on that. I think so. 20%.
SPEAKER_01Maybe the the backbone of geoscience, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I've I felt uh similarly looking at it, I was like, oh, hydro, I'm gonna have to back my you know, I'm gonna have to spend time on that. Groundwater, hydrogeologic modeling, low temperature aqueous geochemistry, like those are things I haven't spent a lot of time on. And engineering geology scared me as well, the the mechanics. Uh I I think, however.
SPEAKER_01Oh, is that right? I didn't know that. I'm not sure why. Yeah, I'm not sure why. But I did.
SPEAKER_00I think did the students learn anything from you?
SPEAKER_01Well, I don't know at the end whether they became engineers or not. Whether whether that course that I was involved with helped them or not.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, but I did it.
SPEAKER_00Okay, they probably got good grades because you just didn't know whether it was right or wrong on the their lab test. Um so yeah, I likewise went into this and I was like, oh, I'm gonna have to work on this a little bit. I took a couple practice, uh, practice questions and was like, oh, Darcy's law, I gotta study that. I I haven't thought about you know Darcy flow equations in forever. I mean, just those these like basic hydrogeological concepts of calculate uh these these types of things were just I'd never I haven't thought about them since undergrad, frankly, probably, uh which is you know increasingly longer and longer ago. Um But that was what you were you were mostly worried about hydro. I was mostly worried about actually engineering geology scared me the most on the surface, like reading through these descriptions. Like engine, it's landform analysis, soil and rock weathering, crown water and surface water systems, low temperature geochemistry, human-land interaction, soil and rock mechanics, soil and rock classification, and engineering properties. It's like engineering properties. I don't even know what I couldn't come up with a question on that. Geological hazards, hazard and risk, cost benefit. So, like some of those hazards and risks, okay. I could, you know, I could probably work my way through that. But the things where it's sort of like calculate the you know, the mechanical properties of a soil, or uh I could probably because it's multiple choice. So that's the other thing about the FG. It's all multiple choice questions. So I could work through some of these things, but I definitely needed to study. The thing actually, interestingly, that I think I probably found more difficult. Well, I don't know. Should we talk about what how I found the test, or should we go through some of the study guide materials that were used to be?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, let's start with actually how you prepared yourself, I suppose.
SPEAKER_00That's I mean, that's so I went into it, I was time crunched. I was not as prepared as I would probably would have liked to have been, perhaps. The good news is that there's a lot of really good study guides out there. Now, Chris and I'd been doing this geology podcast for five years at this point. So we'd we'd learned a lot of stuff that I wouldn't have gotten exposure to. Like we, you know, talking about all sorts of glacial landforms that we've we've kind of learned a lot through the podcast process. So I've gotten a lot more breadth because that also, Josh, I teach the intro, the physical geology 101 class, which outside of my research world, that had that made me think more broadly. It kind of made me revisit some of the basic stuff in geology. So some of the stuff I was pretty comfortable with. I went through some of these study guides. So there are, I'm gonna list a couple ones that I got exposure to. The Asbog, the the entity that makes the exam, they have a bunch of really useful stuff on their website. They have a video series that has been produced by several of the people who who make the exam. Um, the videos you have to pay for these, they are are useful and they kind of give you an overview of each of these different content domains. It's it's like a lecture, kind of. Yeah, it's a YouTube, it's like a it's like a YouTube lecture. You know, there's slide deck, somebody telling you, like walking you through the slide deck. I think it's really useful to for an overview of the content. There's there are some questions embedded in there, so I didn't really get a sense of what the question types would be, what the question styles would be from that, but it is a useful series to go purchase access to. And one thing for students is that employers, you can often convince your employer to pay for some of the study guide material if they will value the PG license at some point in time. So so that's a good thing to note for students out there. Um, they also have uh in their knowledge base on their website, on the Asbog website, the knowledge base, they have bullet points of things to know for each content domain, and they have the kind of categories of you know, the percentages I was listing off. So, for instance, structured tectonic seismology is 12% of the exam. They have in there listed fractures, faults, folds, rock fabric, rock mechanics, structural analysis, plate tectonics, earthquake processes, et cetera, et cetera. Those are listed, and those are really helpful to know. Like if you see words in there, they're like, ah, I gotta study that. That's a good indication.
SPEAKER_01It's difficult to know like how far should you go in plate tectonics. I mean, that's a huge subject.
SPEAKER_00Huge topic, yeah, for sure, for sure. So I think the the benefit the other thing they have is practice questions. They do have, and I think my understanding, at least from our conversation with Keith, was that these are archived questions. They used to be on the exam and they're no longer on the exam. So I think that's what these are. Uh, but they're practice questions that are really useful. So in their candidate handbook on the Asbog website, there are practice questions, and I found those the most useful because they just give you a sense of what are the styles of questions, what are the types of questions. Like, is it is it a question of like, you know, here's a subduction zone, and you have to identify it as a subduction zone? Is it that simple? Or is it something much more complicated? Like, you know, here's a description of the driving forces of plate tectonics and pick which ones could potentially be forces driving plate tectonics. Like those, it it tells you which types of questions there are. So that's a really useful way to go. The other thing that I found uh which was online was I think it was Udemy. Uh Udemy, I'm not sure U D-E-M-Y, that that sort of study guide. I think I think it's a website. I don't exactly know what it is. Josh, maybe you know, do you know Udemy? No, Udemy. It's like a website where individual people can build study guides and then other people can purchase access to them. And you can get like a Udemy subscription. So I think it was like 12 bucks a month. So I just signed up for the one month, got access to this one FG study guide that I think a guy I think had made, um, and just you know went through all the questions and used those again to kind of study. And that was that was pretty useful. Since I took it six months ago, I've been went back to the Udemy page, and there's a lot more individually made people have made more study guides and uploaded them there. I have thoughts on that uh in a minute. But the other thing that people tend to do, which I did not do, is there's a popular study guide material called reg review. And this is one of the big ones. It's uh fairly expensive. Again, you can get your employer to pay for it. I did not get the chance to review any of this stuff, but um, it's a couple people who have put together a really comprehensive study guide. And if you go to like the online Reddit, it's more like that, but I think you can you can take the classes in person in some ways. If you go to a major conference, you can like have a day study guide thing. They're also like a big comprehensive paper book that you get that kind of walks you through all the study guide, gives you a ton of practice questions. And if you go to the online like Reddit forum for the FG test, which is actually really interesting to read, you'll get a lot more information about this. But a lot of people point to that as being the most comprehensive, the best study guide material, but it requires a lot of time. You have to dedicate a lot of time and might be most useful for people who are 10 years out of their undergrad and are you know coming back to the field.
SPEAKER_01What was the most useful of these study tools for you? Do you think?
SPEAKER_00Well, first I started off like going to the Reddit forum and being like, what do other students think about these exams? What do they think about the study guides? And I would encourage anybody to go to that those Reddit forums and look at that and just get a survey because my perspective is not what other people's this my experience would not be what everybody else should should go with. I found the practice questions, the Asbog practice questions and the Udemy flashcards the most useful, just because they gave me a sense of what the questions were. And then I could go and say, Oh, I really need to study this thing. I need to study Darcy flow. I need to like look at well, the thing that was surprisingly hard for me was like the topographic analysis, which I think goes into the basic geology section, like the general and field geology, which I consider myself a pretty good field geologist. But some of those three-point problems, I forgot the rules around it. And so then I had to like kind of work it out in my mind by visualizing it, which is much harder than the three-point problem. And the kind of the topographic rules, you know, how do topolines behave with rivers and stuff? If you memorize those rules, you can answer the questions really quickly. Um, and I had forgotten the rules, so I had to kind of work through those just those are questions that just took me a while longer. So the flashcards and the practice questions were great at that because they gave me insight into that. So they could say, Oh, okay, I need to study these topographic rules. Then I went to YouTube. There's actually a lot of YouTube content out there from professors and things who kind of walk through these. Um, I can't remember the individual names, but I think I just Googled like you know, topoanalysis in YouTube and three-point problems in YouTube, and and there were some really good ones there that had not had a lot of views, let's say, but were very useful for studying the basics.
SPEAKER_01So you think as a like a prof in geoscience, I mean, uh obviously specialized in igneous petrology and I mean Archean geology, I guess. Um, actually, if you just took it like just without preparing, you you wouldn't have done that well.
SPEAKER_00Do you would you say I do not think so? No, I I think I mean, even after, I'll be honest, even after studying, what did I study? I maybe studied two days. Like I spent some time on a Saturday going through all this, and I was like, okay, I need to dedicate a couple days next week, right before the exam, to take it. I probably studied for like, you know, five hours one day and four hours the next day of going through these things, studying kind of in that loose definition of whatever studying is. I passed. But even then, I I kind of left the exam. Was like, I know I got a bunch of those wrong. What's the pass mark? You know, I think Keith told us this in our interview, didn't he? It's like broadly like 65% or something. It's it's not uh, I don't think it's strictly defined, but it's um 70 maybe. I I can't remember exactly what it is. I think it depends, you know, exam period to exam, you know, spring, fall, and depending on the year they they you know, it kind of is a little bit of a moving target, but somewhere around there basically. And I I was pretty confident I passed, but I wouldn't have bet my life on it, um, for sure. So if I hadn't studied and I got more of those like basic Darcy flow law equations wrong, I could have seen myself not passing in the first just because it's those things that you know, you know, it's like we're we're specialists in some really niche thing, and you know, we've we've been exposed to this stuff, but we haven't, we don't out at least I did not remember it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we haven't studied general geology for a very long time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and some of these classes, even structure. I mean, structure, I don't use a lot of structural analysis in my day-to-day life, and that one I could see struggling with with if I hadn't reviewed some of the basics.
SPEAKER_01So inside try and stay away from structural geology, if possible. Yeah, yeah. It's I if I'm doing some field work, if there's any structure, I go somewhere else.
SPEAKER_00It's too complicated. Oh, there's a fault. I I don't want to be by that. I don't even want to look at it. I'm gonna go somewhere else. You don't want to deal with like Euler points and all that kind of stuff. I mean, you know, just I mean, it it gets complicated, man. Um, I agree. So uh to me, if you if you were like, hey Jesse, I'm taking this exam in uh two weeks, I would recommend a couple days of just going through the flashcards, survey yourself of what you have a pretty good understanding of and what you don't, and then and then move on from there. I did start playing with AI tools recently, Josh. So I have a I have a little test for you here. For me, oh no. I took some of these, I'll I'll keep it in your discipline just to give people a sense of what this is. And I think this is actually a useful exercise that I will recommend students do um is to use AI tools for this because they're actually starting the the high-end models are starting to get, I think, pretty good at this type of thing. I took the Asbog prep questions from the Asbog site and then dumped it into. I use Claude, so I dumped it into the anthropic model, Claude, and said, All right, generate a bunch of questions for me based on these. And so I'm gonna read you a couple. Some of them are really difficult to do over the podcast, like these calculations. So for instance, there are actually calculations in the tests you need to bring a calculator. You you can bring a calculator, you're not strictly needed, like you could kind of do rough math because multiple choice, so you could kind of get a rough sense of direction. So, like there's one where the geologist measures the formation contact at an elevation of 1,200 feet on the east side and 1,050 feet on the west side, 3,000 feet away. Assuming the contact is planar, what's the approximate dip? And you kind of have to work that out. So you could sketch this out on a paper and figure out what you know, whether it's A, B, C, or D. But that's not a useful one to do in the podcast, and I won't ask you to do that right now, Josh. But here's one for you. A hand sample of dark colored igneous rock contains visible crystals of olivine and pyroxene set in a fine-grained ground mass. The rock is best classified as A a porphyritic basalt, B, a porphyritic andesite, C a diabase, ooh, a UK word there, D a pryotite. Olivine pyroxine, yep. I would say that it's a porphyritic basalt. Ah, good. A a porphyritic basalt. Nicely done. I think that matches. AO AI was correct. AI was correct in that one. Okay, here's another one. An exploration geologist discovers a zone of disseminated calcopyrite and molybdenite in a quartz monzonite porphyry, surrounded by a large halo of philic, parentheses quartz serasite pyrite alteration. This deposit is best classified as a a Mississippi Valley type deposit, B a volcanogenic mass of sulfide deposit, C a copper a porphyry copper molybdenum deposit, or D a scarn deposit. Tell me, read it to you again.
SPEAKER_01Considering the minerals with charcoal pyrite and molybdenum. Melybdenite. Molybdenite. Sure. Co pyrite is a copper-bearing sulfide. Umybdenite is a molybdenum-bearing sulfide. I would go for the copper molybdenum, and it's also associated with a porphyritic intrusion. Yeah. I would go for porphyrytic copper.
SPEAKER_00There was like a copper. Yeah, it was a porphyry copper molybdenum deposit. Yeah, okay, that would be right. Now, uh, to me, that strikes me as a bit of an easier question. One of the easier ones that the FG exam would would possibly have. So these are not, I would say, accurately hitting the these AI generated ones, aren't necessarily getting the complexity and then some of the nuance that comes out of the professionally made exam things. But if you yeah, but if you just said AI generate, review all this FG content, dump in the candidate resource handbook, dump in the practice questions, and say generate me, you know, 500 practice questions, and you just went through those, I'll bet it would, I'll bet this would be a useful study guide. I mean, I I didn't do the exercise, and I'm not recommending you rely only on AI tools, but I think AI tools are getting quite useful for this type of studying thing. And this is something that I would do for me to help like figure out exactly what I need to study more, and then go back to the primary resource and say, oh, I actually got a bunch of these ones on the geology timescale or the variations on coal chemistry, or like you know, tectonics and geomechanics. I got a bunch of those ones wrong. So now I'm gonna go read the textbook on those a little bit more and study those ones. So, as a study directional study guide, I think some of these tools are kind of interesting. So, well, you did pretty well, Jess. Let me read you another one here. You wanna wanna trip me up? Trip me up, yes. You don't want to be tripped up? Is that not? Okay, how about how about we do this? How about we go to the candidate resources? These are ones that Asbog has made, and I'll give you just a sense of like the real questions here. So a little more stressful. These are not just AI generated things, right? Um, all right, so I'm gonna go FG and blueprints. We've covered that. Okay. FG sample questions. When water contacts pyrite at Earth's surface, the runoff is commonly A, acidic, B basic, C oxygenated, or D nitrogen rich.
SPEAKER_01Well, I would say the answer to that is acidic because acid mine drainage is associated with water and rip uh interacting with sulfide.
SPEAKER_00You'd be right. Nicely done. Nicely done. Well done, okay.
SPEAKER_01That's a high is that hydro question?
SPEAKER_00I don't know. I think that's like a general geology or a low temperature one. Um Lithostratigraphic sequences can be used to interpret A geologic history, B isolated outcrops, C earthquake probability, D absolute ages of successive formations.
SPEAKER_01Um read those again. It sounded like the first one to me. Um something geological history, something like that.
SPEAKER_00Lithostratigraphic sequences can be used to interpret A geological history, B isolated outcrops, C earthquake probability, D, absolute ages of successive formations. I would say A. Yeah, you'd be right. Good. I think D might sound right, but it's not absolute ages, right? Exactly. No, that is geochemistry. Okay, here's one that you might not get. Which of the following anions is the least reactive and most persistent tracer of geochemical contaminant plumes? No idea. No idea. Okay, CO3 negative. Or HCO3 negative one, chlorine negative one, or PO4 negative three.
SPEAKER_01And what was the question about something about tracing a plume of some sort?
SPEAKER_00Which of the following anions is least reactive and most persistent tracer of geochemical contaminant plume. Least reactive, Josh. Least reactive, okay. CO32 minus, HCO3 1 minus, Cl one minus, PO4 3 minus.
SPEAKER_01Oof. I would I would guess the carbonate ion at the beginning or the phosphate at the end. I would maybe I'd go with a carbonate ion.
SPEAKER_00Okay, you're just guessing though.
SPEAKER_01Just guessing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, okay. So 25% probably the answer is chlorine. Oh, really?
SPEAKER_01Okay, I thought that's more reactive. Okay. Interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so there we go. Interesting, right? These are things you don't know. Yeah, uh, this is the this is the use of these things to say, okay, what do I need to study more? And probably don't need to study more basic, like crop, you know, stratigraphic stuff, basic geology like that, but uh groundwater geochemistry. No idea. Very useful. The grain size distribution curve illustrated above indicates the sand is poorly sorted, poorly graded, uniformly sorted, or well sorted. Like to me, that one, I was like, oh, I need to study this. I don't know what these definitions are. I need to memorize those things a little bit more. These are the types of questions that I think uh this is the value. Oh, here's one, Josh. You've you've been up in this area. An escher is an escher. Okay. A more or less linear ridge formed at the end of a glacial advance. B a streamlined glacial landform. C, a conical hill composed predominantly of sand and gravel, D, a sinuous ridge subparallel to glacial flow, composed predominantly of sand or gravel. Sand and gravel.
SPEAKER_01It's uh I think it's the last one. Sinuous ridge more or less parallel with glacial flow. Yep, that's right.
SPEAKER_00Sand and gravel. That'll be right. You've seen some eskers. We've walked on eskers together. We've fished off of eskers together.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we have I I actually uh luckily spend time uh a lot I I teach first well, I used to teach first year field school here. There would be some interaction with the quaternary uh people and this I mean there's quite there's quaternary people that I kind of hang out with here. So I've learned quite a lot of quaternary, even though I didn't really uh in the UK that's kind of considered geography. Oh, interesting. We didn't really do that at all in my own.
SPEAKER_00So that brings up a really good point, Josh, because I this is not every university has the same class structure, obviously, for even a geology degree, even a well-structured geology degree, things are different. So the other thing, the other utility in these study guides, and I think that go to the Asbog resources here because they give you a really good sense of what's the content distribution, like wide angle lens. What did I not cover in grad in undergrad? Like what did if you didn't have an academic geology class, you're gonna need to spend a bunch of time on the academic geology content and studying that stuff. Um, and you know, using all the resources available to to understand that because you just didn't have the class. And so, you know, that's the other value of like these these questions that Asbog has, and actually their their video library as well that Asbog produced. It just gives you a summary. If you've never heard all those words before, that's an indication you need to study that stuff. Anyway, that's those that was the summary. Um, for me, I passed the FG exam, so that was that felt good. Uh I I I can't say I was super worried, but there was always an inkling in the back of my head. I hadn't taken it, I also, Josh, I hadn't taken a test in a long, long time, like a written test. I know. So that was stressful. It's tiring.
SPEAKER_01Well, at least you didn't have to write. I remember I had to I had to take a test. I mean, I had to take a French test, written French thing. Yeah, I mean, that was terrible. But what one of the problem was I I mean, nowadays, like the same with you, Jesse, I don't write very much like physically pen, yeah. Physically. But I suppose this test you didn't have to.
SPEAKER_00No. So but in the street to write an essay. Filling a lot of my notebook, like they give you a note, like a blank note thing that you can take, and then you you have to give that to them. You can't take that out with you. But I did end up filling out a lot of the pages of that with just notes, like especially with these visualization, topographic relationships, that kind of stuff, calculations of like sketching the like the first question asked, the slope question. How where does the I'd just sketch that out on a map and be like, draw a little 3D diagram for myself, then I could kind of work out exactly what the calculation I needed to do was, and it's basic algebra. But um, the other thing I had to refresh embarrassingly was Socatoa. I use Sokotoa a lot. The sign, opposite over hypotenuse, you know, uh tangent, arctangent, like those things. Yeah, the high school trigonometry thing. I had to just I didn't have to review it, but I just had to use Sokotoa a lot.
SPEAKER_01To be honest, I was instantly scared when you said when you started speaking about heightened feet. I was like, oh my god, what am I gonna do with possibly?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the Imperial system. Oh well. That's just numbers. Just could you convert to meters, you can get the same thing, basically. Um yeah, so I think the FG test it clearly is a very useful test to to see if people retained the information that they might have got that they would have gotten in an undergrad geology degree. That's not universally applied, but so there is studying that needs to happen. But I can see I definitely something you need to take seriously. I think I know take seriously, and I came away thinking this is a really good test for this is really useful for the professional geology licensure. So I think the utility of the exam was made very obvious to me. And it also with a little self-introspection of thinking, man, I wouldn't necessarily be the best geologist out in the world at the moment, uh, because I need to brush up on some of these individual skill sets. So um yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean also I mean for me, just random questions like that, even if they're things that I might know a little bit about, it's it's stressful. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we're not I'm not used to this.
SPEAKER_00So how would you do a stressful situation like that? Two questions. How would you go about doing this if you were going to take the FG test, you know, in two weeks? And then how would you recommend students study for something like this? Let's say students, students who are recently graduated, I think you know, they'll they would do okay. But maybe students who are 10 years out or five years out from their undergrad and are kind of reth thinking about going back to study this. So more similar to your experience, maybe.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I mean I I like this uh this AI tool's idea of putting in uh maybe uh I don't know if uh somebody who's ten years out of uh school still has access to PDFs from their lecture notes from different courses. I mean you can kind of uh uh put into Claude, for example, and make a little study guide like that, or like like you did, like ask questions about these things. I would start with something like that. I know a lot of the students we uh teach, they kind of uh test themselves a bit like that.
SPEAKER_00Oh, is that right?
SPEAKER_01Okay. Put put lectures into AI tools and then see what kind of questions that come back. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily prepare them for the type of the same thing. It doesn't prepare you for the type of questions that the prof might ask.
SPEAKER_00And I would, you know, when when people are doing that, I I I think you know, you have to do more than 10, right? You might get one question that's wrong, and that tests you wrong. And you know, if that's one out of ten, that's could be a problem. But if it's one out of five hundred, it's less of a problem. So I you want to do you want to get a lot of numbers, a lot of reps at this for sure. And I the other thing I found about yeah, useful about these tools is you can say, make it harder. These questions were too easy, make them hard, recalibrate, make them harder, or something like that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and practice tests. I mean, that's what I would go for, like like you. I I would feel a bit more confident if I'd uh successfully got through a few practice tests. I would probably do a practice test first straight away to calibrate my levels, I guess, but like you, and then learn in those areas that I didn't do so well, and then have a go again.
SPEAKER_00That would be my uh my strategy. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, cool. Yeah, I think that's super useful. Well, we'll we'll keep on this thread. I I I think it would be useful to interview and to talk to people in the Canadian system at least as well, the Canadian licensure system, uh, as we continue on the this series, and uh when we get to the the eventual PG test, we will cover that as well and think about study guides for that. It's a totally different beast in many ways.
SPEAKER_01When you did your test, do you think you I mean you you studied a whole bunch, but what did you feel like you should have studied more?
SPEAKER_00There's random, so uh what did I what did I know I got wrong? I mean, there was some like geological timescale things that I just got wrong. You would probably be fine at this because you you know you've worked a lot in the Phenozoic in geochronology, so you know these. I just have rarely ever thought about the Fener, like I've forgotten. Oh my goodness, the Holocene, you know, Eocene. I I get these things confused all the time because I've never actually worked in them and had to remember them. I'm starting to get a little bit better with like Silurian, Devonian, you know, Ordovician. The I could put those in the right order. I didn't just list them in the right order, but I could put them in the right order. But other things I'm I'm not very good at. Uh, and so I I know I got uh at least one or two questions kind of like that wrong. I mean, there's some I know I got right as well, but I wish I would have studied that. There was some I wished I'd studied the the topography rules and sort of three-point problem type stuff a little bit more, just because then I would have been able to go quicker through those. I think I I ultimately got the most of those. Well, I don't know if I got them completely right or wrong, but I thought I found the right answer. So I don't exactly know. I thought those were the things that stood out to me as I was like driving home that oh I wished I would have gone quicker through some of these questions that I could have made easier on myself, and then I know I got some time scale sort of stuff wrong. And other other things like basic stuff like that. I think I can't remember what exactly questions were. There was some basic things that you would get in like a 200 level class that I'm I'm sure I got probably wrong. So yeah. Did you use all of your time? I didn't use all the time, I used a bunch of the time though. Um, like two-thirds or more of the time. A surprising amount. I I I was um maybe not a surprising amount, but I I could have gone, I wish I would have gone quicker through some questions because I did use a bunch of the time. Yeah. So yeah. Well, it's good that it's done. It's good that it's done. It's good that it's done. That's exactly right. You're on the way because uh it's a no, I would, you know, you could anybody who's gonna take it, I would uh you gotta study for it. And I would have studied a bit more on on certain aspects for sure. That would have made life easier for me, for sure. So hey, I think we should wrap it up there, Josh. That's all good. Yep. All right, we'll we'll keep on this topic. As always, you a good study guide, as Keith Rapp was very kind to point out. A good study guide is our uh intro to geology camp geo mobile app. First link in your show notes. Just getting reps, it's just getting reps in geology. So we've got a whole episode on Eskers, and uh there might be an Eskers question. At least there isn't the Asbug Canada resources guide. Um, so you know, but just listen to a bunch of that stuff. We'll get you more reps at those basics of geology. You can also follow us on all social media. We're at Plant GeoCast. Shoot us an email. There's a contact us link on our website, plantgeocast.com, and uh we'd love to hear from you.