Before JAA Multiple Choice Q&A ......

[Greg2041]

In the old days, when men were men and chickens were afraid, how were students assessed in terms of their ground-school learning?

Just interested as I hear so many people moan that the current ATPL system isn't fit for purpose and I would be interested to hear if earlier experiences were any different.

:ok:

[PPRuNe Towers]

Multiple choice has been around a long time but for much of it without official question databases. Additionally the added spice of penalty marking punished wrong answers whether honestly given or pure guesses. This made exam tactics very different from today.

Prior to that a decent reference library should give you samples of the exams when they were in written format - short essays and calculations in best handwriting. Although I started flying when motorways were cobbled and rainbows were in black and white these exams were before my time.

Rob

[Greg2041]

Very funny. Thanks Rob.

[paco]

We used to have to draw our own fronts on weather maps, based on information from the station circles drawn on them. The first Nav plot also had to be accurate otherwise the whole exam would be wrong, as the next questions were based on the first one!

We also used to live in box at side o t' road....

Multi-choice questions as such are not a problem, although they are not the best way of testing knowledge, but I would agree that the present EARSA system is definitely not fit for purpose. There are 2 or 3 complaints almost daily to them about the standard of the questions, let alone the poor quality of the LOs. When they changed the names of certain vectors in the POF(H) LOs, they didn't appear to repeat them in the questions, so nobody knows what they mean.

But we are working on it :)

[keith williams]

You had a BOX at t't side of road?

Bloody luxury. We had to live under a DUNGHEAP to keep warm!

The really sad thing about the JAR/EASA question banks is that if you go to the EASA website and read the official instructions/guidance for question writing they are really very good.

It seems that EASA have some very talented people writing their question writing instructions/guidance.......but some much less talented people writing the questions. Having the question writers read the instructions/guidance might be a good place to start in improving things.

[paco]

LOL!! yeah, that about sums it up - anyone who's heard of a Microsoft engineer will know the feeling exactly! The whole thing has the feel of people setting the questions who have no real idea of what's involved or who have never done the job in anger. And that includes the LOs - I don't care how well qualified the people on the SETs are. They didn't even edit the darn things.

[P40Warhawk]

Its a total mess how the questions are written, that you think. Where In my books should I read about this stuff, because I have no clue what they try to ask and want to know from me. Had some really nice ones in MET today in CAA exam.
But I passed easily.

But this is also the case in the other subjects.

[paco]

P40 - you are not alone - the schools are pretty much guessing what to teach at the moment, given the sketchy LOs and the lack of knowledge of the reference material for the questions. The problem is that we don't know whether it is an EASA or CAA problem. Either way, they seem to be bent on teaching pilots to be engineers!:{

I know that the CAA have gone through at least 3500 questions on their database on their way to changing them all to be as far away from the commercial databases as possible.

[P40Warhawk]

Yeah it is terrible.
I understand that it should not been made to easy to become a pilot, because otherwise really everyone could become one. But if you make it hard, then usefull stuff should been asked. Things we will see in future carreer more or the less on daily basis.

Not such stupid questions such as for OPS.
What is the min. age for cabin crew? I DONT CARE.
And about what time is the council of ICAO ellected? Who Cares.

But also in the more technical subjects strange questions.

[paco]

Surely you know what the S/N ratio in a Wohler diagram is - essential knowledge! :E

[P40Warhawk]

Or in Meteo Bergeron Findeiser process. PFFF.

[Greg2041]

All interesting stuff. Thank you good people. It's good to know that there are normal people out there.

:cool: