Originally Posted by
DRJAD
It is fairly obvious, from the text, which of those arbitrary facts in Air Law are important for practical use in the air - and one could argue that if the examinations are insufficiently weighted towards a pass being obtainable on the basis of the practical portions as opposed to the subject hinterland of information, then they are not worth bothering with. I believe, though have not rigorously analysed them, that such a balance does pertain.
Well, you won't hear me arguing for a
PPL confuser on every desk, as I've said. I am rather uneasy about such things.
On the other hand, I've been involved in higher education for ten years, and vocational education for another five, and I've learned a horrible truth over that time:
people can know a subject intimately and still fail exams. Sad but true. People can fail because they are unfamiliar with the style of the examination, or the pace, or because it was never made clear which subject areas were considered most important for examination purposes. I often had students crying in my office because they had failed something or other, when they knew, and everybody else knew, that they had a good grasp of the subject. Slight tangent: in the university world, the problem was usually
pace. Students often think that the 2-3 hours of typical university examinations is a long time, but when they actually sit down to take the paper, they consistently ran out of time because they don't work fast enough.
Practice examinations -- where the questions are of the same type, style, and pace as the real thing -- are helpful to a great many people. But that doesn't change the fact that trying to study a subject by reading past papers (from any source) is anything but a mugs' game.