It is the last step. The other steps vary by state, but in general, it requires that you have at least four years of documented and progressive experience under the direction of another licensed Engineer. You also need to have taken the EIT, which is a general Engineering exam that covers all disciplines, not just computers (brush up on your thermodynamics and concrete mixing!).

If you do not have an ABET degree, then it is still possible to obtain a PE, but the requirements generally go from four years to sixteen years of documented experience.

I may be wrong, I don't think this will be a route for Computer Science. It is more for those individuals who have been programming under other Engineering hats ("controls", "electrical", "mechanical") but now have a way to take an exam that satisfies their actual Engineering work. For instance, I might have fit more under the hat of Software Engineer (since I did a lot of embedded programming), but had to take the Electrical Engineering exam instead due to lack of selection.

Don't engineering licenses usually require a bunch of stuff like fluid mechanics and metal fatigue which are completely irrelevant for reliable software? I think we'd be better served with more statistics and denotational semantics....

The EIT does, because the first portion is a general Engineering exam. It is generally at the sophomore level of a four-year University. The PE exam, however, is related to your discipline, though sometimes tangential questions may appear (some analog circuits on a digital exam).

> I am guessing I could answer enough (how many is enough?) of these 80 multiple choice questions to pass the exam right now.

The cutoff scores vary by year, but roughly 70% is a good benchmark for passing. Unless you fail, your actual score is not revealed. You can see the pass rates here [1], but not the actual cutoffs.

[1] http://www.ncees.org/Exams/PE_exam.php