Support

When completing your exam, we recommend flagging for review any questions you come across that you either don’t know or aren’t confident on.

With any spare time you have, you should split it up by the amount of flagged questions and go and thoroughly review them.

If you have already made a choice, but aren’t sure, it is statistically more likely that your first choice is correct. Only change it if you have a good reason to, such as finding new information in the permitted materials.

If you still have time, try and memorise as much of the exam as possible, particularly question you think you might be wrong on, so that you have a better time completing your KDR’s.

If ever the Swiss cheese model of exam failure lines up against you (as shown below) and you fail an exam, follow these steps.
Step 1: IMMEDIATELY do a full brain dump as fast and accurately as you can. Voice memo on the phone or Facebook messenger yourself. Try to get down every question and answer , plus what you chose word for word. Continue to do this over the next 24-48 hours.
Step 2. Then have a discussion with other candidates about the exam or a brief read of the syllabus to jot memories and repeat step 1.
Step 3. Now use the “what, why, how” method in any order to get to the bottom of what it was about each question that you got wrong, why you fell for ti and how you can recognise and avoid it in the future.  (SO YOU DON’T CARRY THESE ERRORS FORWARD)
Step 4. Reset yourself mentally. Do NOT beat yourself up about it, CASA uses lots of trick wording and they make it bloody hard to pass. Keep it in perspective, it’s just a hurdle, or a road bump on the way to your dream. Accept it happened and use it as motivation to prove them wrong, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get back on the horse.
Step 5. Go do your research and find the correct answers.
Step 6. Massively over-study for round 2, expect about a 40-60% overlap.
Step 7. Use the practice exams to continually drill down to your exact problem issues.
Step 8 . If a week out from your next attempt, you still have struggles or issues find a tutor (instructor or recent candidate who passed that exam) and pay them for tutoring on the exact topics you identified from the practice exams. Paying say $35 per session, for two one hour sessions, on your exact problem topics, can be a game changer. But make sure you identify the problem areas and stick to them, over and over and over in the tutoring session. Do not stray to other non problem areas and create confusion!

Why does CASA use ambiguity and how can I cope with it?

CASA uses ambiguity for one of a few reasons, either they are deliberately looking to see if:

• You can make decisions on the basis of the information you have, even if that isn’t the whole picture
• You can cope with uncertainty and risk
• You can adapt to change
• You have great problem-solving skills

OR

• It’s accidental poor exam writing skills (from people with aviation knowledge but little education knowledge) that discriminates against people with different backgrounds than the exam writers.

Either way, they seem to way over use ambiguity and it is largely assessing, very different skills, than what the rote learner or textbook reader, will be prepared for.

As we know a large part of preparing for a CASA exam is practice:

• Preparing for questions that have two or more correct answers with the slightest of variations, making one the “most correct” for some tiny and obscure reason in the answer
• Preparing for questions that have two or more correct answers with the slightest of variations, making one the “most correct” for some tiny hidden and obscure reason buried in a long worded question
• Preparing for questions that have two or more correct answers with the slightest of variations, making one the “most correct” because CASA tricks you into thinking they are asking one thing, with distracting information and yet is actually asking you something slightly different

In fairness to CASA this competency is deliberately sought by many employers when recruiting and is particularly important in complex, fast-changing environments e.g. aviation.

In fact many role play team activities and scenarios used during the pilot intake and selection process are done with groups of people placed into ambiguous situations to see how they cope, communicate and adapt. Exercises such as being stranded on an island and as a group, having to decide and reason on the 5 items from a list of 25 items that you can take or keep. These exercises deliberately use ambiguity by having 10 or so items that could all be the most important 5 items. No clear winners and few clear losers makes for an interesting exercise in the justification of the 5 ambiguous 5 best items to take.

What they are really testing in these group scenarios, is communication and decision making skills for when something goes wrong in a 787 and the best course of action is not available to the crew. Can the crew arrive at a justified and agreeable outcome based on only the limited ambiguous information available. Much like Qantas flight 32, when the A380 suffered an uncontained failure enroute London to Sydney.

Pilot’s who can manage ambiguity well, are well placed to work effectively in complex organisations, complex aircraft that are subject to change, defects and abnormal situations, as well as the organisations they work for with constant route, fleet, personnel changes and reform, making this a valuable sought after skill for the aviation sector and for pilot safety.

So how can you develop your ability to better cope with ambiguity in CASA’s pilot exam questions?

• You must WANT to learn how to cope with ambiguity and VALUE it as a key skill to develop
• Actively look for examples of ambiguity all around you. Look for how a sign or instruction could be read with 2 completely different meanings, simply because of someone’s background or the double meaning of a word or pause in reading it
• Look for ambiguity in practice exam questions and learn to LOVE the fact you can begin to identify, the use of ambiguity
• Work out how you could turn a question into a trick question, by using the most subtle of changes
• Practice writing some ambiguous trick questions using the most subtle of tricks
• Understand that the question writer ALWAYS has a different background TO YOU, and OFTEN may mean something slightly different to what you originally thought.
• ALWAYS question the question if it’s ambiguous “What are the actually asking here?”. This automatically places your brain in a position, to think the question may have multiple meanings. It’s a great way to approach all questions.
• Know that you can see what you think is the same question, but a subtle change in the available responses can alter the correct response, especially where an answer has two correct responses, where one is most correct.
• Know that in many cases, the use of one word, can completely change the “context” of a question or response
• Use PPE’s IDEAL method for ambiguous questions and answers:
  • Identify all those options they could be asking
  • Decide what they are actually asking
  • Eliminate your two worst options
  • Analyze your two best options against the REAL question and pick one
  • Look over it later to make sure you are correct

During the actual exam, for ambiguous questions, keep very brief notes about your IDEAL method use, so when you come back to check, you can remember what they actually asked and which two options are best, or why you eliminated the other options.

So our best advice, is start to view ambiguity as a positive skill set and something you love and want to learn yourself, rather than an evil thing you don’t understand.

Start actively looking to develop skills in finding ambiguity on a daily basis until you start seeing ambiguity everywhere.

Learn to love the fact, you can cope with ambiguity and have a new found skill set employers seek and love.