The #FAA requires a 70% to pass #pilot licensing tests.
This appears to be, in large part, because the tests are absolute garbage. They are ambiguously-worded, they have questions about ratings you're not even trying to get, and the charts they provide have larger margins of error than the gap between answers.
If this test weren't so incompetently assembled, they could require 90% to pass and have more qualified pilots as a result.
@LouisIngenthron driver licensing tests, too - I think it might've been 75%, but the point stands. "What is the maximum possible penalty for someone convicted of drunk driving, if it's their second offence, and the first one was committed more than two years ago but less than five, and the first conviction was when they were a legal adult but still under the drinking age, and they blew 0.13 on the breathalyser, and..." Buddy, what I took from that section is that the law says *I* can't drive drunk. I'm not the judge, what the law says he can or can't do in any given situation is really not what I was studying.
@khird Yep. I literally have to memorize the rules for an airplane towing an unpowered glider through the air, which is bad enough.
But then I get questions like "Weather is the result of: (a) pressure differential, (b) movement of air, or (c) heat exchange" and as a student of physics my answer is "ALL DAMN THREE."
@LouisIngenthron yeah I can't even see what they're hoping for you to say there - sometimes you'll have multiple technically correct answers but it's clear which is the one they want to see. I'd guess (a)? Because you can have rain with calm winds, or wind events like derechos that result from movement of different-temperature masses of air but no significant heat transfer between them, but the barometer is a pretty reliable tool to predict weather changes.
@khird That was my guess too!
And it's wrong. Because they say that the pressure differential is *caused* by heat exchange, so that's the right answer.
But it's caused by a dozen other things too, so screw the guy who wrote that question.