Failing topics: why one mistake fails the exam
Some questions have no average: a wrong answer to any one of them fails the whole exam, even if everything else is right.
Most of the exam has a margin: you can get a certain number of questions wrong and still pass. Failing topics have no such margin. These are questions where a wrong answer points to something that puts human life at risk — a collision, failing to recognise distress, entering a divers’ area or a bathing beach — so a single mistake on one of them fails the whole exam.
Where they appear
Not in every exam. On this site they are marked in Motorboat (power class A), Motorboat (power class B), Jet ski and Seamanship:
- Motorboat (power class A) — 138 of 315 questions marked, across 11 topics.
- Motorboat (power class B) — 100 of 223 questions marked, across 13 topics.
- Jet ski — 93 of 161 questions marked, across 11 topics.
- Seamanship — 110 of 362 questions marked, across 6 topics.
The logic is the same in all of them, so most of the topics recur: collision situations between vessels, failing to recognise distress, failing to recognise divers, lack of care near a person in the water, a vessel aground, entering a bathing beach and the swimmers’ strip. Motorboat (power class A), Motorboat (power class B) and Jet ski add eight more topics, among them entering a firing area or closed zone, putting to sea despite a storm warning and drifting or losing your way out to the open sea.
Why it changes how you study
In the rest of the material you can work by average: put more into what is weak, let a small corner go. Here that does not work — 90 per cent on a failing topic is not ‘nearly excellent’ but a real risk of failing, because one question is enough. It is the only part of the material where the target is 100 per cent, and it is worth getting there before you go on improving other things.
How to study them here
- Failing topics in Motorboat (power class A) (in Hebrew) — all 138 marked questions in one place, with the answers, and you can practise exactly those.
- Failing topics in Motorboat (power class B) (in Hebrew) — all 100 marked questions in one place, with the answers, and you can practise exactly those.
- Failing topics in Jet ski (in Hebrew) — all 93 marked questions in one place, with the answers, and you can practise exactly those.
- Failing topics in Seamanship — all 110 marked questions in one place, with the answers, and you can practise exactly those.
- The history page counts separately how many of the failing topics you already have under control, so you do not have to guess.
- In every mock exam the marked questions are listed in detail at the end, even when you pass.
How to recognise such a question
Not by its topic but by what the wrong answer does. A lights question that ends ‘What action is required?’ and whose distractors lead to a collision — that one is failing. The very same question, when it asks only ‘What is the vessel?’, is not. In the question bank every marked question shows its reason, not just the mark.
And if you are only just starting — here is what the whole exam looks like.