During college in Indiana, a couple of us software engineers wanted to take the state's "Professional Engineer" certification exam. Just to see how we'd do. We were told plainly, "you cannot register for the PE exam because the state of Indiana does not recognize software engineers as 'real engineers'". However, if we were Electrical Engineers and wrote embedded software, that would make us a "real engineer". They explained that the certification was primarily designed for Civil and Mechanical engineers. One guy looked into changing his major temporarily just to take the test but assumed the college administration wouldn't be thrilled about that.