Common mistakes in the boat licence exam

Not mistakes in the material — mistakes in the way you study it. The ones that send people who knew the material home with a ‘fail’.

The exam is not trying to trip you up, but it is built so that an answer that sounds sensible turns out to be wrong. Most of its distractors are not absurd — they are exactly what a reasonable person would do, and still not what the regulation says. That is where most of the mistakes below come from.

1. Learning the answer instead of the rule

The most expensive mistake, and usually the first. If you remember that ‘the answer to question 47 is c’, you get question 47 right and fall on its sister. The exam words the same rule in several ways, and a small change in wording is enough for memory to stop helping. After every wrong answer, stop and ask which rule was being tested, not which letter was right.

2. Answering right-of-way questions on gut feel

‘Who gives way to whom’ looks like a matter of common sense, and it is not: it is a table. Intuition — ‘the bigger one first’, ‘whoever was there first’ — is sometimes right and often wrong, and that is exactly where the distractors sit. The only way that works is to learn the order of giving way as it stands, then read each question as an exercise in slotting the vessels into it.

3. Skipping picture questions

Questions that refer to a picture feel cumbersome to study, so they get pushed to the end — and in the exam they simply turn up. In Motorboat (power class A) they are 137 of 315 — about 43 per cent of its questions. They are also exactly the questions where it is easy to improve, because they repeat a small number of patterns.

4. Treating a failing topic like any other question

Some exams have questions where one mistake fails the whole exam. If you arrive with ‘most of the material under control’, you can still fall on one of them, because with these there is no average. How to recognise and learn them.

5. Aiming for the pass mark

A pass mark sounds like a target, and it is really the edge. In the Jet ski exam you may get 4 questions wrong in all, and that runs out fast: two questions you did not get round to studying, one you read too quickly, and one you simply got wrong. The person who arrives with a real margin above the bar is the one who passes on a bad day too.

6. Leaving a question blank

A blank question earns no mark, exactly like a wrong answer — only without the chance of getting it right. Even if you did not know, mark something.

7. Leaving the ‘technical’ exams to the end

If you are studying for Mashit 30 you sit five separate exams, and many people start with Seamanship because it is the interesting one. Engineering and Instruments get pushed to the end and get less time — and they are precisely where you may get fewer questions wrong. It is worth starting on them a week before you feel like it.

All of these are fixed the same way: practise, see what breaks, and go back there. How to turn that into a routine.