FAA Standards for oral examinations on Practical Tests

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

What level of detail should be expected from an FAA examiner when administering the oral portion of a Practical Test for adding an additional rating on a CFI Certificate in an Area Of Operation marked as NONE, or not required, on the Required Area of Operation Grid at the beginning of the Practical Test Standards?

Specifically, In adding a Multi-Engine Land rating to my CFII, columns I, IV, and XII in the table are annotated as None, indicating that they are not required to be evaluated on the examination. I realize that at the bottom, in the Note, it states that "At the discretion of the examiner, the applicant's competence in any Area of Operation may be evaluated". My question, however, is in what detail should I expect oral examination in these areas?

In particular, the source material for Area of Operation I, (Fundamentals of Instruction) is the FAA handbook FAA-H-8083-9A, (Aviation Instructor's Handbook), which I had to study extensively to take my Knowledge test 2 years ago, (which I passed), contains 228 pages of academic material sufficient for at least one full semester of undergraduate course in psychology, maybe two semesters, and, for all practical purposes, is of little or no value to an instructor's day-to-day activities. 80-90% of the material is academic analyses of what are common-sense concepts which the average instructor with any experience understands intuitively, but in all likelihood, cannot regurgitate from memory in the organization or structure as presented in this handbook.

I was told by my instructor that the oral portion of practical test are now defined as to be "Open Book", i.e., if you don't know for sure, you must simply know where to find it. So, for details from this Instructor's handbook, like for example, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, or the differences between Thorndike's Laws of Learning and Bloom's Domains of Learning, etc. etc., is a examinee on a practical test responsible to have this knowledge at his recall by memory without aid of the handbook, or is it sufficient that he/she be aware of it and know where to look it up when necessary?

Again, I am asking about an Area of Operation marked as Not required (although optional) on the Areas of Operation matrix for a specific Practical Test.