Exam questions that are never or rarely asked

[Northern Highflyer]

I have my brush up in a couple of weeks time for the first 8 exams and am interested in which areas/subjects either never, or rarely appear in the papers.

Before I get shouted at, yes I have studied (am still studying) ALL the material as I know that anything can be questioned in the exams. I also know that the brush up will focus my mind on the key areas, but I would like to throw it open to a wider audience for discussion.

For example, I have been told that there are very few plotting questions in the Gen Nav paper, and the ones that do appear are quite straightforward, none of the complex transposing of DME arcs etc. Looking at my notes I would expect there to have been several, fairly complex questions on this but it appears that is not the case.

Are there any others that stand out in your mind that made you think "well I studied all that and it was never asked" ?

[FlyingForFun]

N.H,

I would (politely) suggest that this is a very bad question to be asking people.

I could (if I remember that far back) tell you what wasn't on my exam papers. But I only did each exam once, so I really don't have a good idea of what a "representative" exam would be. Just because something didn't crop up on my paper, doesn't mean that half the exam wasn't based on it the previous month, or the next month.

Schools, who get feedback from the exams every month, would be in a much better position to answer this than individuals who have sat the exams. But their answer to the question will be reflected in their feedback, anyway - if there's a particular subject they don't get any feedback from, then they can't include that subject in their feedback exams, so it pretty much takes care of itself.

Good luck with the exams!

FFF
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[Northern Highflyer]

Hi FFF

I appreciate your comments but as I said in my original post, it was just a general discussion I was looking for. Hopefully those who have been there, done that, may wish to comment (or not) on the subject.

I am not looking for shortcuts to passing exams, no point in that at all, but as with all exams, some areas seem to be flogged to death while others never appear.

As I also said in my original post, I have studied all the material as I appreciate anything can be questioned at any time, and I am sure my brush up will focus my thoughts.

Maybe I should reword the thread title to something like

"what surprised you about the exam content"


Regards

NH

[High Wing Drifter]

Braking coefficients. I believe a number of people failed the IFR exam some time ago because these came out of the blue.

I would not say there are very few plotting question in Gen Nav. I seem to remeber about 5 or 6. I do remeber that collectively they were worth >10 marks!! Although the plotting was simple, the questions were hard to interpret and the tolerances were rather tight on a couple of them.

For Met, I believe that questions relating to castellaneous, mamatus (?? is that right) and other freaky cloud formations are rare but do pop-up occasionally.

[pa28biggles]

Northern Highflyer,
I have to back you up here. High Wing Drifter hit the nail on the head. Being tested on subject matter, that maybe one would think is nice to know information, when it is actually must know information.
If I remember correctly, there were a few pages in the IFR Comms notes that contained tabulated info, I have a suspicion that these were braking coefficients. I spent a bit of time on these, but not long enough to be able to reproduce the info in an exam.
A tricky thread to start maybe, but a relevent one nontheless :)
(No dig intended at FFF :ok: )

[silverknapper]

To be honest, let your groundschool look after you. As has been said already they are the experts and will guide you on what could be deemed as 'more' relevant.

[Alex Whittingham]

The answer to your question is so complex that you should, as silverknapper says, leave it to the crammer course where there is time to answer you at length and in detail.

There are certainly areas that are in the syllabus, must be taught, but don't get tested. You have correctly identified some bits of plotting as one of these. There are actually quite a few plotting questions but they are always easy peasy and never involve transferred position lines.

[OneIn60rule]

A friend of mine recently sat the Airframes exam. This guy actually had access to Abacus on-line and he did nothing but abacus just before the exams. (sorry if this sounds like an advert.)

The result is that his official exam was just like the practice ones.

About schools> Some schools will give you a huge amount of questions on things that they truly believe are going to be asked. Other schools will give you more questions on subjects that came up on a recent exam. My school fortunately could foretell that on the R-nav exam there would be a load of gps+Loran C questions (Know all you can about those two is my suggestion)

I can tell you that whatever questions you've been doing are worthwhile but you'll probably see that when you do the real exams that you'll have a load of easy questions instead of half of them being really tough.
Not trying to say you'll have an easy time with any exam, just that schools tend to give you a lot of heavy questions in feedback.


G-nav CRP-5 handling is key. You should practice CRP-5 questions at least a week before your exam, if you don't then you just might run out of time. ( a lot of questions recently just on Crp5)

Advice> DO NOT CHANGE ANY OF YOUR ANSWERS in the EXAM, chances are that your first milli second of instinctive answer was correct. *in my case I changed at least 2-3 answers which I should've left alone.*

Good luck to you sir.

[Flypuppy]

Having had to do a couple of resits, all I can tell you is that you can expect the unexpected.

I know that doesnt really help much but in my experience the exams have a hugely variable difficulty level. One month can be
p!ss easy and the next month people will come crawling out of the exam hall in tears wondering what the hell that was all about.

I remember the January 2002 AGK exam was a stinker (rumour was that europe wide only 26% of candidates passed) but the February exam was reasonable, by all accounts. Since I wasn't one of the 26% that passed, the first available resit was March and that exam was more or less as expected.

Best advice is to let your groundschool guide you as to what the latest trends are.

Do they still ask those stupid three wind drift questions?

[Northern Highflyer]

I am more than happy to be guided by my groundschool. They are the experts and boy do I need guidance. ;)

Just thought it would have made an interesting topic for discussion from the students' point of view.

Thanks to all that have replied for your worthwhile and interesting comments. :ok:

[RichardH]

Though in most reference books and a useful thing to know you
will NOT be examined on multi-sector PSR/PET questions in Flight Planning.

Just make sure given the parameters and reading the question
use the correct formula for the appropriate problem.

Braking Coefs have been around IFR comms more or less since JAA started, but the coef is in whole numbers.
Eg. 25 not 0.25 for Poor.