Were the exams like you expected?

[Nishko]

Having sat the following this week:

Mass & Bal
Instruments
Meteorology
Flight planning
Gen Nav
IFR & VFR Comms
Human Perf.

I and many others I spoke to were a little surprised and the balance of questions. Particularly in Instruments and Mass & Bal. I was pretty confident of getting passes in all, but now I expect to be going back next month :( Before you ask, my training school were excellent but I suspect that these papers caught a few of us off guard....

I was also very alarmed at the sheer number of people re-sitting last months papers - is this normal???

Any comments would be interesting.

N

[Unusual Attitude]

There were definitely a few surprises in last months Tech exams which I sat.
The Instruments and Systems papers were both particularly tricky, the feedback my school had on these subjects however was perhaps not the best.

Out of 8 of us on the brush up course, from what I can tell only 2 or 3 of us passed them all first time.
Not very good odds at all considering there were some very bright chaps/chapette (You know who you are!) on the course.

Apparently its going to get worse from September as the JAA dump a whole heap more questions into the mystical question bank which no-one is allowed to check for accuracy.

Oh well, suppose we'll just have to grin and bear it as usual !

Best of luck with your results anyway, I had to read mine several times to believe that I'd passed them all.

Tis a very nice feeling indeed !

Regards

UA

[Manflex55]

What does "IFR & VFR coms" involve ? I took my exams quite a long time ago & never had this subject. Does it replace the old CAA "Navaids" ?

MF

[EGDR]

Nishko

I too took those exams this week. I didn't think there were too many curve balls in there. But it does vary from the sublime to the ridiculous, ie, instuments was a bit tricky and comms was a daylight robbery - £37 quid for those 2 pop quizes !!!

There were a lot of tacho questions at the end of instruments which may just through the balance the wrong way !!

M & B appeared straight forward - what was the snag there ?

Still, I'll tell you in 10 days or so.

[ 10 August 2001: Message edited by: EGDR ]

[Scratch One Bandit]

I sat Inst, Nav and Flight Plan at Gatwick.

Nav was a lot of hard work, I finished and got about halfway through checking my paper. The majority of people I spoke to didn't finish. The first half of Inst was great, lots of exact feedback, second half was really quite hard, too many tacho questions for my liking. Flight planning was quite hard I think.

Over all I think they went fairly well, and if I've have passed these three, I've finished!! For now, I have three question marks above my head, waiting for these results, much like this chap :confused:

[Nishko]

Thanks for the feedback. I have to say that the exams were far less calculation based than I had expected - that is in Mass & Bal for instance there was only one question relating to moving and adding etc. I found this a little frustrating because that is where my strong point lies.

On the other hand, many of the questions in all of the papers were basically fairly easy, the only problem here being that many of them were asking for exacting answers to what could be best described as 'fringe questions'. As importantly, I did find time to be a bit of an issue. I admit that I am not the fastest pen in all of England - but I can see little value in adding unnecessary time pressure to what is already a fairly tense couple of hours!

Overall, I would like to see some of the questions revised, or indeed removed simply because they weren't worded properly, or in a few cases simply didn't have a correct answer to choose from. I know that there are people working hard to persuade the CAA to get this resolved.

It'll be a slightly shakey hand opening that envelope when it comes, but whatever will be will be. At least I'll have a better idea of what I need to read up on for next time, and a full cooked breakfast @ £1.20 can't be agued with :)

Best of luck to all.

N

[EGDR]

Not to worry Nishko - not everybody is as fast as Jens !!

I know what you mean, there were some totally random & badly worded questions in there.

I think mass & Balance had less than 50 % calculations, if I remember correctly !!

Good Luck

[Midland Maniac]

I was also confident on passing at least 5 out of the 6 papers that i was sitting. I was very suprised by a lot of the papers...especially Flight Planning, Instruments and General Nav.

Flight planning just seemed a hell of a lot different to the feedback that had been given. All of the high loaded questions, I got answers that were halfway in between two answers!!!!

Instruments was more like an AC electrics exam. I mean i sat my systems exam about three months ago, so i have forgot most of that crap!!!!

General Nav was a strugle to complete in the time available. I think that someone was having a laugh when they put that exam together!!!

So you are not alone in thinking that the exams were crap...lets just hope that the results are not as bad as first expected!!!

MM :mad: :mad: :mad: