avrodamo
24th Jul 2001, 02:45
I have been reading with interest how alot of you guys have just passed your exams. Well Done !! I am 3 months into my DL ATPL with Bristol. Im committed. I work hard. I spend every evening apart from when i'm nightshift studying, i do full days on 2 of my days off. I'm on target, and i'm doing well in my progress tests. My question is what study methods did you find worked for you, especially for revision. I find at this stage i have very little time for revision as i'm still digesting chapter after chapter of the course. Did you revise as you went along ? Did you have pure revision study after you had digested and worked through the whole course ? What method did you use? Loads of exam questions to work through or digesting your revision notes. Any feedback would be really helpful.
I want to be able to tell the pruners that i did it at the beginning of next year !!! :rolleyes:
Secret Squirrel
24th Jul 2001, 05:46
Hey Avro
It's been a while since I did mine (1995!) but this is what really worked for me:
If you are doing this self study then you have my admiration because I am not self disciplined enough to do that, and in any case I need answers fast or the questions burn away in the back of my head until such time as I get them answered. I did a CAP509 course and was never a good student at school.
I presume that you will be doing your techs and your navs seperately with some time between the two (does it still work that way?) Any way, it doesn't really matter, it just makes it more manageable. I drew up a timetable; during the week (bearing in mind I'd spent all day in the classroom) I set aside 3 hours every night from Monday to Thursday. Every hour I did a different subject so that if I started with, say Radio Aids at 6pm on Monday, it would come around again at 6pm on Thursday and so on. Friday was a travelling day back home and Saturday was a six hour day (again split into hour intervals) and Sunday was a rest day.
You really have to set yourself a rest day as you can overload yourself. The advantage for me, I think, was that in this way I didn't get bored with it. I assume that the method is the same but I just used to go through the vast numbers of question papers; correcting them once I'd finished and then trawling the books for the answers to the ones I'd got wrong. VERY, VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO THIS; IT HELPS TO CONSOLIDATE YOUR LEARNING.
With the new JAR papers being relatively recent I suppose your question bank for each subject is limited but we had scores of them. Mostly, of course, although the papers were different, there were only really about 100 - 200 different questions depending on the subject. About the only exceptions were Met Practical and Flight Planning where the scenarios were different but the tricks and traps were the same.
As you well know, it's all about RTFQ & RTFA!
I stuck rigidly to my timetable regardless of strong or weak subjects.
I must admit that I was very lucky in that where I had digs, my flatmate was an extremely bright spark who was excellent help with things like Perf A. If you haven't done this yet, I found it an absolute B@ASTARD of a subject and the only way to pass the exam was to PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!!! Incidentally, this bright spark later got a letter of commendation from the CAA for his ATPL results; his lowest mark for the six subjects (we'd done CPL Navs so got credits for HP, Signals & Air law) was 98% and got 3 of 100%!!! He went straight from Cranfield into the right hand seat of a 737 at BA.
Anyway, hope this helps, best of luck.
SS