I am graduating college in a little under three weeks and then completing an admissions flight a few days after on December 16. Assuming all goes well, I’m shooting for a start date at the beginning of February, so that will give me roughly a month and a half to get as many written exams out of the way as possible while working part-time (call it 20ish hrs/wk). My question is would getting all of them done in that time be a realistic goal? Either way, I’m just going to grind out as many as I can, but wanted to get some feedback on the legitimacy of knocking them all out before the start date.
I already have 1st class medical and finance stuff figured out.
Personally a month an a half isn’t enough time. It took me about a month alone to do the PAR and then about a week per test thereafter. I also had no problems doing the tests while also in the program since I only came in with that one test completed.
How long does it take to run a mile? I have a friend who’s an elite triathlete and can easily break 5min. The average is about 10. Me? I’ll old and fat and would probably take a week.
People learn and absorb information at different rates. A month and a half could be enough time, but it might not. Joshua above said it took him a month for just the PAR but that again was Josh. You might take longer, you might take a fraction of the time. I’ve known people who’ve studied for 2 days and passed and others who took a year and still struggled.
Anyway you get my point. Start studying and see how it goes. If you only get one done that’s one out of the way. Two is better, three still better etc… The thing to remember is it’s not a requirement and it’s not a competition. Either way you’ll be fine it’s simply the more you can complete now the less you have to do later.
I doubt that will be enough time for you to complete all of the writtens. Remember that it is more important to score well on them than to rush through and complete them with sub-standard results. Even having one or two out of the way will be a big advantage.
You very well may not have time to take all of them, but you should be able to get at least a few of them out of the way. As he mentioned, it’s very important to do well on each one. It will certainly help when it comes time to take your checkrides, as generally speaking the more you get wrong, the longer the oral portion of your checkride will be.
That being said, as Adam mentioned, everyone is different when it comes to testing, and everyone absorbs and retain material differently.
I came in with credit for private, so I had 5 writtens to take. I was able to study for, and take all 5, in exactly 20 days. Granted, that was studying 5-6 hours a day, 6 days a week.
It seems like a more reasonable time frame and average among students is about 2 weeks per exam.
In any case, study hard, take your time, and do the best you can on each exam. You’ll thank yourself later!
Thanks for the input. Like I said above, I’ll just get through (and obviously understand) what I can ahead of time. Appreciate the tidbit about two weeks/exam in your experience.
