his may look like a personal outlet, but I just want to be objective.
EASA is supposed to be a standardised authority for Europe, so the exams it creates should be standardised too. But as I understood every EASA country has a big degrees of freedom. Yes, the central question bank is the same, but every country can choose the questions to use, deleting the ones not considered valid.
There's also a problem regarding the time limit of 18 months. In some countries you have lots of sittings, (I was reading in this forum that in Sweden you can even get personalised sessions), while for example in Italy you get 2 sittings a month and often you can't even successfully take part to then because they're already full ( also add the covid) , but the 18 months are equal for everyone.
I can't see why this is a problem, so long as the 18 months and maximum number of sittings is identical, it's just a reflection of the different scales in different countries. I only did CPL writtens in the UK and had a fraction of the opportunities ATPL candidates had - it was fine, I just planned for it.
The last issue is about the fact that the question bank is secret; what's the point of this? If the questions were 100% secrets, they fail rate would skyrocket, because no one would be able to pass without studying on the QB.
To force you to actually learn the subject, instead of memorising the questions. Same with university exams, school exams, etc. And quite right too.
So we have to rely on third parties websites that collect the questions ( from students feedbacks they say) and then kindly sell them back to us ( I wonder how them avoid copyright violations accuses from EASA).
No, you have to learn the subject.
This said, wouldn't be better for everybody to get an official QB released from EASA where the students can do exercise? This way we could also avoid to find out at the exam that the QB has been updated to the most recent version overnight, and that our study was done on a wrong set of questions, like happened in UK ( I can't post the link to the article, but it was published by Bristol GS and the title was: caa refuse either credit exams introduce quality controls ). All this to say that we would need some kind of class action to get a more transparent a standardised way of testing, because in the current situation the ATPL looks a lot like a game of luck.
It's fine if you actually learn the subject, and just use sample questions for practice.
If your approach to becoming a professional pilot is to simply memorise the minimum information and parrot it with minimal understanding, you don't belong in a professional flying environment.