Post by Surfer!AFAIK the BGA has stopped doing this, as some students were simply
learning the answers to all the questions rather than the actual
reasoning.
Good for them. They should have had more questions in their question
bank!
The FAA has about 4000 questions for every exam subject and there is
no way (short of having a seriously weird brain) of learning them by
heart. I've done the FAA PPL and the FAA IR with loads of computer
revision and when I sat the real exams I could identify only a few
questions (out of 60) from the practice material.
If your question bank is just 25 questions, which it used to be for
the CAA/JAA PPL when I did mine (because everybody sat Paper #1 and
the only people who saw Paper #2 etc were those who failed #1) then
it's only a matter of time before students who have just sat the paper
record their recollections and pass them on, and within a short time
you get an underground publication which is available to everybody who
wants it. This is what happened with the JAA ATPL (before it became
overt); it was routine for ATPL exam students to study from "practice
questions" which were the real questions as remembered by people who
have just sat the paper.
The CAA/JAA exams, with their 25 questions, were just plain silly. How
can you test somebody's knowledge of *any* subject by asking 25
questions? Especially as quite a few of them are plain stupid, like
the year the ICAO convention was signed.
The FAA also has an oral exam of 1-3 hours which you will fail if you
don't know the stuff that matters.