New syllabus using old syllabus books

[P1 Forever]

Hi everyone,

I'm slightly concerned as I have been studying using the old syllabus atpl books but will be doing the new syllabus Easa atpl exams. Is there much difference or is there new subject material been added? I just don't want to enter into an exam and find that half the paper is different from what I've been studying.

Also, Is Bristol still good for the new syllabus?

Cheers!

[paco]

Can't your provider sort that out?

[4015]

Regardless of OP's personal situation, I'm interesting in knowing if there is much difference between the old and new syllabus myself.

[Alex Whittingham]

The syllabus hasn't really changed a great deal. The two main changes were an attempt to rationalise the content of each subject, so that material wasn't duplicated, and the inclusion of more up-to-date systems. The main rationalisation was between 022 Instruments and 061 General Nav where Inertial Nav systems, FMS and compasses were tested in both subjects. This means that, if you are learning from old books, very little of what you learn will be wasted, it just may be examined in a different subject. The additions have been things like FANS and CPDLC, but these are not heavily tested so your training provider should be able to bring you up to speed in those subjects on your revision course, provided it is done properly.

Bigger changes are the addition of new questions in nearly all subjects in the database, as ever these have not been properly validated and can cause problems by being outside the learning objective requirements, badly written, etc. As far as I know no question database provider has access to the complete set of new questions yet, although it is very tempting for them to say they do. The best you will get is feedback data from some of the exams.

Finally, some states have created their own problems as they realigned their databases to the new LOs by not setting up the algorithms for exam creation properly. In the UK there have been problems with General Nav, which has more questions in the new syllabus, and with 032 Performance where far too many graph questions were included for some months. Both these papers made students very short of time. General Nav now seems to be sorted, Performance does not.

These are the pass rates for old and new papers in the UK for the last four months, apart from Performance they look OK to me, but draw your own conclusions:

[pudoc]

Thanks Alex, I've been looking for some sort of comparison like that!

[P1 Forever]

Cheers Alex for that info.

I do hope they get Performance sorted in the next few months because those Perf results look disappointing!

[fwjc]

Alex, those charts make interesting reading. They reinforce my feelings about the exams I sat - which were easier or harder than I anticipated. It's interesting to see the variation from month to month as well. I would expect to see that for the new syllabus while they normalise the question set (I feel for the poor candidates who paid to be beta testers here), but even in the old syllabus there's considerable variation both between subjects and from month to month. Fingers crossed that they improve this in e near future with the new syllabus.

[Alex Whittingham]

You'd need to see the full data set of marks scored against candidates to make complete sense of them - the CAA don't give this out. I'm sure that the mean score and the standard deviations of the mark distribution vary from subject to subject and, when you have a mean closer to 75%, like in Meteorology and General Nav, a small difference in the difficulty of the paper (perhaps one dodgy question) shifts the mean only slightly but means proportionally more people fail that month than would happen in the comms papers, for instance.

[P1 Forever]

How about the maps, charts and CAP 697, will there be different material for the new syllabus exams or just use the original CAP 697 and ED-6 Germany 1999 edition?

Also, do the new syllabus Gen Nav exams have any compass or INS questions in them or am I correct that they have been moved?

Thanks