You failed to perform proper risk management.

You failed to properly asses the benefit of saving a few minutes by
skipping a few questions with the risk that you may have just blown your
chances at a serious aviation career by passing by the skin of your teeth.

Fortunately for you, it turns out that your omission may not actually cost
you an aviation career, but since you didn't know it at the time, it was
undoubtedly bad judgement...


chris priest wrote in
:

Andrew Sarangan wrote:

As for skipping questions because you are confident of passing the
test, this too displays an attitude towards taking shortcuts. It might
be worthwhile for you to read about risk management.

I understand there are things you can risk, and then there are things
you just can't risk. When you are on final approach, you just *can not*
skip those final checklist items. On the flip side, when you are doing
a cross country, you *can* afford to skip writing down your time en
route between checkpoints in your flight log if you are preoccupied
with your VOR receiver failing. I felt like I could afford to skip
certain questions on my test and not have it negatively effect (meaning
fail) the test.

Risk management is all about *managing* risks, not avoiding any sort of
situation imaginable that may in some slight way have a negative
effect. There are tons of things experienced pilots do that could in
some way negatively effect safety of a flight, such as neglecting a
micrology while dealing with an emergency. These are unavoidable and
they happen all the time. The difference between a good pilot and a bad
one is that pilot's ability to deal with these situations, and what
they choose to omit, and not omit.

I didn't go in there and skip every question, as that would have been
poor risk management. I only skipped those questions which I knew would
not effect my ultimate goal which is, and always has been passing. When
I did the SAT, I did not skip any questions because that would have
lowered my score and the goal there is to get the best score you can.
The FAA knowledge tests are not the SAT.

Now on the other hand, if the grade is something that could come back
to haunt me come time to get a job, then I would say what I did was
wrong. That was the whole point of this thread. Will the grade effect
me? If so then I'll try to get a 100 next time. If it doesn't, then I
won't sweat it. Either way I'm going to pass the test and begin my
training aloft where I'll cement the things the things in my mind that
I didn't already know. Isn't that the whole point in doing the oral
part of the checkride?