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Old 7th Feb 2018, 17:47
  #33 (permalink)  
Alex Whittingham
 
Join Date: May 1999
Location: Bristol, England
Age: 65
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Yes. There's no reason why training material cannot be written to both teach the subject and to answer the exam questions. The only issue is the time lag between new and unexpected questions turning up and getting material updated which, even in a near perfect world, would be six months. That gap is covered in full time courses by the instructors (or should be), in distance learning courses by the revision courses (or should be) and in advance preparation for the revision courses by question banks. I really struggle with instructors at big integrated schools sneering at question banks, their students are subscribing (at extra expense) to get a service which, frankly, they should be providing.

My view is that you should be exposed to exam questions from early on in your training. We test our distance learning customers at three levels. Each CBT lesson is followed by a quiz of 5 to 10 questions, the purpose is to check understanding. The quiz questions require 100% pass as they are regarded as 'required knowledge', they may be CQB questions, they may be generated by us. Every group of lessons (a topic, if you like) is followed by a progress test, longer, almost always CQB questions, and with a lower 75% pass mark. This allows an early sight of exam questions and consolidates knowledge. Results from both allow us to track student progress. Finally students beat the question bank to death before the revision weeks so they have seen everything about the exam we can show them before the classroom session and are able to ask questions arising both from their study and from the CQB questions they have seen.

Using question banks on their own is foolish, in its simplest terms it means you can't understand the explanations you are given, you are reduced to learning answers. This will result in a big fat fail unless you are incredibly lucky/have a photographic memory.
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