Originally Posted by
Maddoggin
Is it the cog or the knowledge test that guys are getting hung up on? Or are they both looked at combined?
Originally Posted by
4fans
I was wondering the same thing. I'm sure they are all looked at combined but those guys probably know what they struggled with.
Mr. Kraby said that there is a minimum score on all tests and a minimum score on the interview. If you pass them all, they will hire you. If you fail one, they will not offer you the job. The knowledge test question bank is 800 questions large, and some of the questions are harder than others. They know this, and the grading takes into account whether you missed a hard question or an easy question.
Originally Posted by
Flying Elvis
I know of a few pilots (one of whom I know well, and he's a smart dude who prepped hard) who have failed the cog and a couple others who have failed on knowledge.
IMO, the cog test is a less-controllable variable. The one guy I know well who failed the cog test thinks he knows exactly when it went downhill - he just got flustered and wasn't able to recover. He'll pass next time, I'm sure, but 6 months of seniority is 500 numbers! That's going to take a lot of banana peels to recover from.
The knowledge test is something you can prep for much more quantitatively. There are definitely "discriminator" questions out there, some of which I'm convinced are placed to be time sucks, to give you the opportunity to make the poor decision to spend 5 minutes on that question instead of skipping it and driving on. Yet though just about everybody studies their posteriors off, everybody also seems to walk out thinking there will be a semi-canine offspring around a few months later who looks vaguely like the guy they saw that morning in the mirror shaving.
Prep or stay home. Say what you want to about the interview process, but if nothing else it probably does a good job of screening out the lazy folk.
I could see how getting flustered would make the cognitive test snowball. I put the stylus down in between sections and made it a point to take a few deep breaths and try to relax before beginning the next section.