Originally Posted by
TryingToAvoidCBs
I would also add in regard to Officer Kites comment "Quite honestly, I wouldn't have passed without the question banks. I don't think any ATPL student can argue otherwise", with all due respect you can't have worked particularly hard then.
I actually had a good laugh at that LOL. Whilst not passing judgment on someone I've never even met nor do I have a clue as to how hard they've worked, I can assure you I have worked my socks off since starting here continuously. There is also a mental rollercoaster attached to the ATPLs from all the stress, fear of failure and there are times when it gets a bit much. As most other students, I put my heart and soul into this. I therefore highly suggest you bugger off with that nonsensical and baseless judgment and get off your high horse.
Back to the OP. We started off with AGK, it is a rather detailed subject, that is where the challenge lies. I started off literally writing out detailed notes of everything, I refused to move on unless I knew the topics inside out, started with airframes, then onto gear systems, hydraulics etc ... all was OK until we hit electrics. It just didn't click, I wrote out enough notes on A4 pages to compile a mini thesis ... then i tried the question banks to see where I was at with regards the official exams (no point knowing it if you can't pass the exam stuff) ... I was failing quite regularly or getting mid 70s. Others in my class who were not doing much other than the question banks were passing the school tests and this was all being sent off to our airlines. My flatmate did nothing other than the question banks and was flying high in our airline's eyes.
Then, anyone with a brain, would do something about it. And this is why I offered the advice that I did. I changed my approach and used the question banks as a study method, now when I say used the QBs, I don't mean I memorised the 1629 answers in the AGK bank, I mean I based by study off the banks. If I answered a question right - great, if i got it wrong - i looked up in the explanation why I was wrong. Bit by bit it all started to come together in my mind. I passed AGK yesterday with 87%, I am quite confident that I had a decent enough understanding of it, and there were about 10-15 new questions I mostly got right to prove that. It is also impossible to memorise every question, there are some in which scenarios are given and you must state if 2 statements are correct or incorrect, there can be hundreds of these in a bank - you must understand the theory behind this for example. And also there are some questions which just do not make sense - you tend to remember these anyway.
Best of luck!