I just did the 7 in a row at the school as a box ticking exercise so they could sign me off for the real thing. They take place over 3 days, but I’ve no idea how they’re scheduled i.e can I sit 4 on Monday and 3 on Wednesday of my choosing, or if they have a defined schedule where I could be sitting IFR Comms at 9:05 (about 7 minutes to complete) and then nothing until Meteorology at 16:30. The latter would certainly suck.
@Peter, the seven exams for the CBIR are not hard at all to take on one day. The introduction to the computer system, the do´s and more importantly DON´Ts (cheat, that is) took about 30 minutes. I was finished about 2,5hrs later, including having breakfast at the cafeteria. Air law and instrumentation were surprisingly hard with many unknown questions, flight planning was really easy and went much quicker than I thought. There was more than enough time to recheck every question, although I´m not sure if that is always a good thing to do.
Several possibilities:
I´m certainly not the smartest guy around! :) The Aviation Exam QB was quite good, and I think you can´t compare it with the IR you had to take before CBIR came around. Thank God, otherwise I would have taken the FAA road.
Also my twenty years in ATC might have helped a little.
I’m still taking the full IR exams as the CBIR doesn’t exist in this country. However there is very little difference between the learning objectives. Rather than having a dedicated CBIR course, BGS gave me the full IR course software with a word document of what to omit. I was up to 85% completion of the full IR course by the time I’d gone through all the CBIR stuff.
What the CBIR does offer is fewer questions per exam, which I think works against you as it hugely increases the variance. The CBIR Air Law exam for example only has 18 questions. A couple of those stupid ATC separation questions and you could be in trouble quickly. Currently my Air Law marks vary between 70 and 95% over 29 questions where my Met is much more tightly bunched between 77-85% over 63 questions.
When I did my IR, 7 exams were exactly the same as for ATPL and question DB was full of nonsense. I took all 7 at once and failed the one I didn’t learn (Meteorology) because I was sure I can rely on my knowledge of the topic. Maybe the content of question DB has been improved over the years and somehow is more related to actual flying.
I was in the same position as that when looking at the JAA IR c. 2002, except that the 7-exam option didn’t exist (or perhaps, more accurately, nobody I spoke to in the training machine knew about it) so the full 14 was my only option.
That discovery launched me on the FAA route, with the FAA PPL in 2004, N-reg 2005, IR 2006… During that time the 7 exams for the JAA IR were formalised (in the UK at least) with about 1/3 chopped off relative to the 7-exam subset of the full 14.
Sounds like you had to do the jet performance stuff as well…
The CB IR 7-exam set was supposed to be a further reduction from the JAA IR 7-exam set but there were no resources for creating new (e.g. more relevant) questions, so the original JAA ATPL QB was still used. From the above posts it looks like this was done by reducing the number of questions, which I suppose is pretty obvious… the problem is that you get a bigger variation and it’s easier to fail “by bad luck”.
Anyway, congratulations, niner_mike
Thanks @Peter
zuutroy wrote:
I just did the 7 in a row at the school as a box ticking exercise so they could sign me off for the real thing. They take place over 3 days, but I’ve no idea how they’re scheduled i.e can I sit 4 on Monday and 3 on Wednesday of my choosing, or if they have a defined schedule where I could be sitting IFR Comms at 9:05 (about 7 minutes to complete) and then nothing until Meteorology at 16:30. The latter would certainly suck.
Taking all 7 exams for real across tomorrow and Tuesday.
Met at 9, RNAV at 11:30, Air Law at 13:30 and IFR Comms at 16:00
Then FPP at 9, Health & HP at 11:30 and Instrumentation at 15:30
Not a bad spread but would prefer to start with something easier! The exams take place right in the city centre so plenty of places to go and hit the question banks with a coffee in between.
