Well, my General Class license course ended on Thursday as our club VEs came in and gave the test as the last session. Only eleven people showed up to take the test, and of those only eight or nine passed the written test. (When I left, two of those who had failed the first time were re-taking the test. One of them missed by only one question, so I think she had a good chance of passing the second time.)
I honestly thought all of them would pass the test. When the head VE asked me if I thought any of them would fail, I said, “Of course not. A good teacher has to have confidence in his students, after all.” Of course, I wasn’t completely sure that all of them would pass, but I thought they all had a good shot. Those who I thought would have trouble passing just didn’t even attempt the test at this session.
To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed at this outcome. I thought more people would come to take the test, and that more would pass. Perhaps next time, I’ll assign some homework to the students, and then discuss some of the questions in class. That would give me a better read on their progress. (It would also help me to get to know the students. One of the odd things is that I didn’t get to know the names of many of the students until the class was over. Since I didn’t assign any homework, I didn’t have any way to associate names with faces as I would in a for-credit class.)
I’ll take some of the blame. The classes were sometimes disorganized. The reason is that this year I decided to not use the suggested lesson plans in the ARRL Teachers Manual. Last year, I did use them, and it was even more disorganized, imho. I think the sequence of topics was pretty good this year, but I need to work a bit more on how much to cover in a single week.
dah di dah dit, dah dah di dah
Three people took the code test, and fortunately, all three passed. It seems a bit odd to me, but all three of them would have failed if the only way to pass the test had been by answering seven of the ten questions correctly. They all failed to do this. Instead, they all passed by copying at least 25 characters in a row correctly.
Three of the students passing the written test had already passed the code test, or were given credit for the code test for having been licensed as a Novice. That means that out of 26 students who started in January, six now have General Class licenses. That’s actually kind of disappointing.
I do think that most of the others are going to take the test at other VE sessions, so I’m sure that percentage will improve, but I’d hoped that more would be ready to go at this test session. I’m going to keep on them until they all get their tickets.
Leave a Reply