The examiner had absolutely no responsibility to test this whatsoever.
If it wasn't one of the required areas, and he didn't
pick it optionally, he was fully correct in not doing it.

The instructor, on the other hand, had complete responsibility to
train this to proficiency, and endorsed as much unethically in the
student's logbook.

Or the student's memory is bad, right?

The FAA as far as I've seen almost always comes after the CFI license.
The most famous cases are the power plane fuel mismanagement
cases. Lotsa accidents from these.

The occasional examiner gets fired too, sometimes for
not ever flying with the applicant at all! But this seems rare.

Most instructors and examiners seem to do it exactly right.
CFIs train the part 61 and PTS areas completely, and to the
level of correlation. Examiners stick to fundamental areas
in listed references and conduct an efficient test of the required
sampling of areas, at the correlation level.

There is some judgement involved. Is training to the
"Handbook for Naval Aviators" standard of explaining
the forces involved while firing a missile, in an inverted turn,
a reasonable standard. I don't think so. Are signals
on tow or spin recovery procedures a reasonable standard?
Sure.

Somewhere in between there is some gray. How big the
gray area becomes seems to be an interesting topic...

In article .com,
wrote:

By debriefing
their students after flight tests, they have learned exactly what a
particular examiner will expect. This then allows them to train their
students
for a flight test with that specific examiner, rather than bothering to
train for a thorough test in accordance with the PTS.

A blatant example of this was recently evident when I did some acro
with a pilot who had just passed his Private Pilot Glider flight test.
During the first high tow I asked the pilot to turn the towplane toward
the airport. The pilot then told me he had NEVER done signals on tow
before.

A few other relevent questions about stalls, slips and spins, showed
that this pilot's knowledge base was quite deficient. However we
cannot blame the pilot for these shortcummings. He was trained by an
FAA certificated instructor and passed a flight test given by an FAA
Designated Examiner. Unfortunately for this pilot, his training was
done at an operaton known for shopping around for easy examiners.
--

------------+
Mark J. Boyd