How did you do it? Confessions of a busy CBIR student.

Fernando wrote:

How did you guys power through the CBIR theory without losing your sanity?

Just put your head down and do it! :)

I’ve done two full passes of the theory books, so the sequence for me was:
1. Read and understand (don’t memorise much) the books, key is to understand the most of it.
2. Go through the questions on aviationexams.com once – it will give you an indication of what you are missing.
3. Read and memorise the outstanding bits from the books.
4. Go through aviationexams.com until you answered every question correctly at least once.

And Bob’s your uncle!

In the end, it was not so bad – ~700 pages for all seven subjects is nothing comparing to many IT manuals I have to read daily.

For me, the biggest problems were:
1. From the QB perspective – Aircraft Instruments; mainly because you have a very small amount of questions asked at the exam, so if you miss a few questions, you fail.
2. From the amount of data perspective – Meteorology! Just a lot to read, you might want to do that one last.
3. From the timing perspective – FP&Performance – you need to find all those things on the actual maps, and fast. The general advice here is to use the actual paper charts for everything as well as actual whizz wheel and actual calculator to answer the questions.

It is not so bad, believe me.
Although, I wouldn’t want to repeat the experience! :)

I echo what arj1 said above. Try not to get too bogged down making very detailed notes from the literature and instead focus on the question banks (https://www.aviationexam.com/ is very good as mentioned).

Once you pass the first few exams you will find yourself very motivated to pass the rest! I found the instrumentation, communications and human factors exams the easiest.

The theory (at least the course I got, the Boeing/Jeppesen one) is utterly non-pedagogical, filled with stuff not relevant to a private pilot / single pilot operations. I just let it run while watching TV, reading forums, sometimes tapping the screen so that it believed I was there, so that it registered the “study time”, and then I banged the question bank repeatedly.

I did it as lionel, read the theory once and then banged the question db for several weeks. What helped me was to get a slot for the written exam, so that I had a “due date”, which helped alot for motivation.

I have three good tips:
1. Spend your time on question banks
2. Spend a lot of time on question banks
3. Question banks, all in.

Unfortunately it is the name of the game in today’s system.

In my days it was still classroom which was good in a way because the teachers focused on the stuff that’s really important. And it was fun to sit in class with likeminded folks. Anyway, these times are gone, right?

Yes, outside of class it was endless QB banging. I was lucky that my daughters were starting to be more interested in other boys than daddy.

I am like you Fernando (although not studying the IR).
Here is what I do :
- first I found out I was a morning person
- I always carry my study books with me sonI am flexible to study anywhere anytime
- I tried to study before the family wakes up, but hypoglycemia is a problem for me
- studying during the commute may be a solution for some
- mainly I get a little early at work and study before the crowd comes in. This is helped by my beloved wife who takes care of the children in the morning for the most part
-ruthlessly guard your time and attention during the most productive part of the day (morning for me)

If I were you living in London, relatively close to the exam sites, I would plan exams quickly, one by one or two by two, starting with the easiest.

Take courage !

PS : a bit shocked that every TK provider seems sub-par and every IR pilot just banged the question bank. That’s not the way it should be for me. Rant closed.

Do you first start with the distant learning course?

I had three steps to take. The first one was that distant learning course. It’s useless. Never in my life was I confronted with so bad texts to read. I thought I’d do the course in english because it’s aviation language, but the scripts from the CAT course are written in such a bad “Denglish” (which is German-English) that I was unable to memorize anything from that. If you’re confronted with so many errors, not only typos or grammar, but also substantial, you just can’t concentrate. I terminated on this torture when I had to read “attack angel” instead of “angle of attack”. I requested an exchange with the German version. Wasn’t good either, but way better. At the end of that course there’s a first exam to finish that course. It’s not hard, but still you want to be prepared. After that I did a loong break, mainly because I could not find another break at work. It was more than a year.

After that there was a second step, that is totally made up by my ATO. They want a student to pass a full exam based on the aviationexam catalogue. Not only that in aviationexam there are a lot more (and harder) questions than in the real exam, they wanted to see 85% correct instead of 80% to let one pass. They want to assure high pass rates in the “real” exam with that. Now the best way would be to take the “real” exam directly afterwards. However, it’s not so quick to get a seat at the exam, and you only get a seat whenever you passed the “intermediate exam”. During Covid it was even worse because less students could write the exam at the same time. So I had another 6 months until the final exam.

However, in general, 90% of the work is clicking answers in the question catalogue. You can do that anytime.

I can’t say that it’s NOT a torture. And an insane amount of hours. Sitting alone at the corner of a sofa clicking some silly questions. Is that what you wanted to read?

A long time ago I helped a friend with some of the JAA CPL theory, naïvely thinking it would make me a better pilot. Explaining a concept to someone else makes you identify the important points and better internalise them yourself. As posted already, for passing the exam he found ‘question spotting’ in the database the only effective method. Good luck. This too shall pass