Originally Posted by
spitfirejock
I was once told, many years ago, by the then Head of UK CAA Licencing, that the whole purpose of making the exams difficult is to reduce the number of qualified pilots in the system, if it was easy, he quoted, supply would be far greater than demand.......clearly there have been times of pilot shortage when he was wrong, however, it might still be true today!
On the flip side, I recently engaged in a conversation with an experienced airline pilot (35 years on the job) who was funding 2 of his children through pilot training and his attitude was "just teach them the answers they don't need to learn all this crap". I was horrified to be honest but perhaps an indication of modern attitudes and what we now call the 'entitled' generation.
Who knows, I am not clever enough to understand many modern attitudes to the acquisition of aviation knowledge coming from a generation who had to write the answers long hand...no multiple choice in those days, but I still remember today a large percentage of what I learned almost 40 years ago!
SJ.
See.... I think it would be much more valuable if there were less questions, more quality. How did you work it out? Why did you choose this option? A paper with 20 questions in 1 hour that demanded you showed some mastery of the knowledge, rather than a paper with 60 questions in 1 hour where rote memorization of a few formulas and a few skim reads of the text book and a couple of days with memory cards will get you through. That would also require quite a revolution in how the subjects were taught as well.....
I think that attitude of your airline pilot friend speaks to the same kind of thing as some of the experienced pilots I've talked to are saying.... get through the theory tests and into the aircraft where you ACTUALLY learn what you're going to need to know! I don't think its entitlement, more a frustration with a lot of (what seems like) wasted time, effort, and money!