On Feb 8, 10:50 am, "Michael J. Coslo" wrote:
On Feb 6, 10:54 am, wrote:

The closest I have ever been to old time tests is an old 1957 Ameco
test guide for Novice and General. I was a little shocked to find that
some of the questions were verbatim to today. Granted there are only
so many ways to phrase some of them, but verbatim?

Why not?

When the VEC system was created, they didn't start the question pools
from scratch. They just took the existing exams and expanded the number
of possible questions.

Some things haven't changed (40 meters in the USA has been 7.0 to 7.3
since 1929) so why rewrite the questions?

Looking over the
questions, the Novice was amazingly easy, and the General would have
required me to spend an afternoon studying about tube circuits. No
difficulty there, at least for my current knowledge level.

The Novice was intended to be amazingly easy.

Remember that in 1957 the Novice conveyed very limited privileges
(small parts of 80, 40 and 15 CW, plus half of 2 meters, voice or CW.
75 watts input, crystal controlonly.)

More important, a 1957 Novice license was only good for a year, could
not be renewed, and was a once-in-a-lifetime grant. Once a person's
Novice expired, they could not get another one, and it was upgrade or
leave ham radio.

The result was that most Novices were quite motivated...

So yeah,
they weren't the questions on the official exam, but I can't help
think the books were put out with a very good idea of what the
questions would be.

Of course. But there's a very big difference in having a study guide
that indicates the general areas that will be on the test, and one that
shows the exact questions and answers that will be used.

Remember too that in 1957 the FCC was still using essays,
draw-a-diagram and show-your-work calculation questions on the exams
for all license classes except Novice.

So, I believe that the answers have been out there for a lot longer
than F.C.C. question pools, Bash books and all the other examples of
how things are easier today than they were "when I was a kid".

Sure. But there's a big difference between knowing the answers are
outthere, and knowing exactly what the questions will be.

So what is the discrepancy? I think that we sometimes forget that we
are always learning. There was a time when I would have had
difficulties with the tests. Before I learned what I needed to know,
they would have been hard stuff. I suspect that many of the folks who
look at today's tests and scoff, remembering how they had to struggle
when taking their version of the same class might just be showing how
much they've learned in the intervening years.

Yup. Or how little they knew back-when.....

I think another factor is the difficulty-of-access part. Some mayscoff
at this, but it was a real issue in the bad old days.

What I mean is that, when FCC did the exams at FCC offices, just
getting to an exam session could be more involved than the actualtest.

For those of us near big cities that had FCC offices, travel was no big
deal, but for a hams further out it could be a serious journey.
Particularly after FCC increased the "Conditional distance" from 75 to
175 miles in 1964 or 65. FCC exams were usually only given on weekday
mornings, too.

If you failed an exam, you had to wait 30 days to retest.

No CSCEs; if a license required both code and written exams, you had to
pass them all at the same test session. The General class ham trying to
upgrade to Extra would have to pass 20 wpm receiving, 20 wpm sending,
the Advanced written and the Extra written all at the same session.

There was also a time when FCC charged fees for the tests. Adjusted for
inflation, the fees could be substantial. $9 in the 1960s equatesto
about $50 today.

For a working people, such limits to access could mean taking a day off
work and significant travel time and expense. For a kid in school, such
as I was, it meant waiting for an exam day in the summer or on a school
holiday that wasn't a federal holiday.

What all this added up to was a real incentive not to fail, because
retesting was such a bother. So many hams would overlearn the material
in order to be absolutely certain of passing on the first go. Very few
would go to an exam session just to see if they could do it; the costs
were too high.

What the old system also did was to make it very difficult for those
who had various forms of "test anxiety" which often had nothing to do
with their knowledge of the material and everything to do with the cost
of getting to the exam session.

To many hams of those days, the exams probably seemed a lot "harder"
than they really were, because of the pressure. I think it's a very
good thing that the VE system has eliminated or reduced those problems.

At the same time, I think it's important to recognize the differences
and how things have changed.

73 de Jim, N2EY