Ground School...

Hi Again,

We have arrived in Phoenix, it is hot and very busy! But more on that in the next post, I will wait until a little
more has happened and we are all in a better mood!

Thought a little bit of information about what to expect at ground school might be helpful to some people so here we go.

In short ground school is long, hard and a struggle for motivation! It is a really good thing that everyone will tell you this, because what I actually found was it really was not so bad. The work was manageable, if you spend all the class time concentrating and making notes, and roughly four or five hours in the evening consolidating what you have learned in the day, making more notes and completing the CBT (which may be annoying at times but is really useful.)

We are very lucky at CTC that we have loads of resources and the time to literally live and breath the subjects, if you work hard a good average is perfectly achievable. I did not consider myself to be very intellectual when I started this course, I had no Maths or Physics A levels and a degree in Management!But with hard work I have managed to leave ground school with a 93% ATPL average, all first time passes, which is perfectly acceptable to me!

Module 1 exams in my experience were not too bad. The question banks that are available could be relied upon pretty well to give a accurate idea of what to expect in the CAA Exams, also the CTC mocks were very accurate in my experience for module 1. Most of the questions are knowledge based and as long as you have the knowledge, no problem! The only problem with Mod 1 for me is that it lured me into a false sense of security for module 2, I tho

Module 2 was a whole different kettle of fish. Module 2 is not really knowledge based at all, more skill based. You need to know the processes and procedures to answer the questions inside out, and be 100% competent at carrying out these procedures. There are very few "question and answer" questions. Most are calculations or processes that need to be followed to find the answer. Making this more challenging, all of the answers are plausible and you will be able to get all of them if you change the process very slightly. So, best advice is find the way that works for you, stick to it and trust it. The CTC mocks for module 2 were a lot easier than the real CAA Exams, and the question banks were not really very reliable at all. Another thing I found useful is to be really careful when extracting data from graphs,  tiny variation on the initil graph or table, by the time that you get to the final answer there will be a huge variation. If I had to do Mod 2 again I would spend a lot more revision time putting myself through real timed exams, the time limits in mod 2 are very tight, especially for G Nav, Perf, Mass & Balance and Flight Planning.