Newcastle Uni cclosing Aviation program
Lancer, you need to look at the background. The review board for aviation was appointed as a result of the decision to review the programs offered by the University. Aviation was and is not the only discipline under review. Several programs are supposed to be axed. The review board simply established that it is uneconomically to continue the aviation program considering the resources and investment required to elevate the program to an Asia-Pacific centre of excellence. Admittedly it was not helpful that the then program director severely resisted to accept more international students in fear they could be terrorists and "bomb us" and his absolute refusal to consider offering the courses to airline cadets with the reasoning that "nobody tells me what to teach".
During the past two years the University exams were similar to CASA ATP exams and even more difficult. The CASA pass rate is very good now in Courses like Flight Planning, Air Navigation, Air Legislation as well as Performance and quite satisfactory in the other subjects. The problem is somewhere else. Firstly, the passmark of any University exam is 50% by law. There are students who just don't attend lectures and tutorials or make no efford hence fail the exams or just pass the University exams with 50%. These students still demand to sit the CASA examinations and, unless the law is changed, the University would have no right to refuse any such student to sit a CASA exam.
There were talks with CASA but to no avail. The people pushing through the proposed legislation do not support tertiary University degrees. I have more than good reasons to suspect that CASA aims for a pilot training system into which Universities and even TAFE would not fit. However, let me not go into this in this thread, it is a separate issue.
There are some who, correctly, say that the number of students from the University of Newcastle who failed CASA ATP exams was quite high up to mid 2003. May be some find it interesting to learn that the University had trouble recruiting suitable teaching staff and contracted Sydney TAFE to provide the instruction at great expense.
This is over since the beginning of 2003 since the University managed to engage someone with an airline background and who is experienced in ATP training. Now TAFE is not any longer used and the pass rate has significantly improved.