Rules & Regulations of the State of Tennessee
Title 0820 - Land Surveyor Examiners
Chapter 0820-01 - Rules of Tennessee State Board of Examiners for Land Surveyors
Section 0820-01-.04 - SYLLABI OF THE EXAMINATIONS

(a) Mathematics applied to land surveying: The applicant should be able to apply the principles of algebra, plane geometry, and trigonometry to land surveying problems of regular, irregular, and curvilinear boundaries.

(b) Fundamentals of surveying: The applicant should have a thorough knowledge of the legal aspects of land surveying and land surveying terms; consistency of angular and linear measurements, the interrelation of errors; steel tape corrections; instrument care and adjustment, the Tennessee Coordinate System; astronomical observations for azimuth; meridian or longitude and parallel of latitude; magnetic declination; magnetic variation; and magnetic bearings, true bearings, differential leveling; profile leveling; cross sections; cut sheets; the theory and use of stadia; topographic surveying; and control surveys by triangulation and traverse, for both ground and aerial surveys.

(c) Surveying of areas for their correction, determination and description: The applicant should be able to plot and write property descriptions, obtain property descriptions from legal records and lay out and monument such property; he or she should know the relative weights legally to be given monuments, distance, bearings, angles, and areas in the redetermination of old boundaries; he or she should be able to determine the directions of lines of a traverse by the deflection angles and by azimuths; he or she should be able to compute latitudes and departures, determine missing data from descriptions, adjust a traverse for closure error, compute coordinates of traverse points, and compute areas of irregular parcels including those bounded by curvilinear courses.

(d) Surveying of areas for the conveyancing of land and for the establishment and reestablishment of internal and external land boundaries, and the plotting of land and subdivisions thereof: The applicant should be able to divide areas into smaller tracts; determine the internal and external boundaries thereof; determine missing data from descriptions; lay out and plot roads, street and sidewalks, topography, and contours setting forth road grades, and determining drainage on the surface, reducing topographic notes; interpolate contours from elevations; prepare topographic maps using ground surveys and aerial surveys with photogrammetric methods of compiling aerial photographs; and compute horizontal curves and vertical curves.