FD Deck Mates and Masters exemptions

[perksy121]

Hi guys, anyone heard any news on the review of the FD Deck exam exemptions for the Mates and Masters courses? I've tried google but had no luck

[Steve]

Roger Towner said you can **** off but some have scraped through.

Not sure if it's been publicised yet.

[perksy121]

Ah ok, ummm with the risk of sounding like a total prat, is Captain Towner for or against the exemptions?

[Steve]

Against. Apparently the chap who OK'd the Mate's writtens exemptions for FD no longer works for the MCA...

[waverider]

I heard everyone has to do SQA's now for Master's and Mates

[perksy121]

The FD Masters and Mates courses are still on the course lists for WMA, to be honest I didn't even know they were under review until I saw it mentioned on the forum somewhere

[penfold]

Giving OOW candidates exemptions from class 1 and 2 ticket requirements is a bit silly frankly; there need to be some hurdles to jump through in order to sift out the poltroons.

[YoungMariner]

The SQA Examinations for Chief Mate are probably the hardest set of exams that I've studied for. They involve negative marking, and a hell of lot of rote learning methods. The exams provide very little value in real life navigation, but I strongly believe they exist solely to do as penfold says, and that is to weed out a few people going to the next step.
I remember sitting my SQA Stability, several people had dropped out within the first few weeks of the course, and then in the actual exam one guy sat down opened the paper, and then a few minutes later got up and walked out (never saw him again). The pass rate is fairly low, and very few people pass both papers on the first attempt (thankfully I passed both, but still have nightmares thinking about them). If you fail one with insufficient marks, you fail the other exam too. Then you have to wait 4 months to resit.

I think there could be better ways to examine, filter and prepare people for going upwards to Chief Mate and then Master. Maybe even put people through their paces on a simulator again before taking the Masters Oral.

[Sdot]

It would be good to hear something about what's happening with the written exemptions. The MNTB said colleges should contact the PD/FD Deck folk with news. Sadly my college isn't to great at passing important information when I'm there never mind just now at sea so I feel I will be contacting the MNTB soon.

On a personal opinion doing the PD course is intense and the Graded Unit exams (3 of them) are equivalent to the MCA Writtens so the way I see it is I've already done the writtens, just at a different time. I do not think that just because I'm doing the PD course it should exempt me from Mates. After qualifying for my OOW ticket, then x amount of years at sea I think the majority of stuff taught as cadets would be long gone. My preferred outcome would be that Mates writtens is no longer exempt and new cadets starting in September 2012 and January 2013 will no longer be exempt from the OOW writtens.