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One of the problems that I faced when commencing my ATPL exams was deciding on which ATPL question bank to use to practice ATPL questions. The most popular question bank when I was doing my ATPL ground school in the UK, was Bristol Ground School question bank.
There are other question banks available, and I wanted to spend some time on the blog reviewing other ATPL question products so yourselves doing ATPL ground school can decide where best to spend your hard-earned cash!
I reached out to ATPL Online to see if they would allow me to review their questions, and they have kindly provided me with free access to their ATPL Online question bank for this review.
Thank you ATPL Online. If you find this review helpful, please leave a comment and don’t forget to visit ATPL Online (https://atplonline.co) if you wish to sign up.
One of the gaps I found during my ATPL exams was that nobody actually teaches you HOW to study – and I struggled initially as I had been out of education for a while. Check out my How To Study Effectively class on Skillshare – Skillshare is running an offer at the moment for 2 weeks FREE.
In the class, I share my study techniques of how I completed my ATPL exams in just 8 months whilst juggling a full-time engineering job (and hour building at the weekends)!
ATPL Online question bank overall rating: 72/100
- Interface: 16/20
- Price: 13/20
- Explanations: 10/20
- Interactive/ live student-led exam feedback and comments: 13/20
- Support and customer service: 20/20
Pros: Good question bank overall, easy to use and linked to the Padpilot course material chapters for ease of reference.
Cons: Explanations not available for certain areas and would love to see the ability for students to leave live feedback comments on questions integrated into the platform, e.g. students being able to flag similar questions that have appeared recently in exams.
Interface
ATPL Online has two websites. The one relevant for EASA ATPL Exams is atplonline.co (not atplonline.co.uk).
The interface itself is easy enough to navigate, and the dashboard allows you to pick your simulated exam.
What I like about ATPL Online is that you can pick questions either by Learning Objectives, or question type (multiple-choice, text input etc.) or search for specific question references within the database.
As you can see, the interface is easy and intuitive to figure out and get what you need. One of the aspects that I think could improve the user experience is to create an offline and dedicated app.
The ATPL Online question bank is certainly mobile and tablet friendly via browser, but it does rely on having a decent internet connection and cannot be used offline. For the majority, this will be fine.
I did my ATPL exams via an ATPL online course through distance learning around my job.
When I was commuting via train and wanted to make the most of the time, I appreciated being able to access ATPL questions offline, for example, as the CATS Aviation question bank allows. In case you missed it check out my CATS ATPL review.
ATPL Online Interface: 16/20
ATPL Online Price
I wanted to do a comparison including BGS question bank but unfortunately, when I went to check the Bristol Ground School Question bank pricing, their site was temporarily offline.
I have chosen ATPLGS and Aviationexam instead for price comparison. Prices correct as of 20/12/2020.
| Subscription | ATPL Online Question Bank | Aviationexam Question Bank | ATPLGS Question Bank |
| Free trial | Not available (7 days for £10) | Free trial not available but Free test available | Free test & 7 days free |
| 30 days/ 1 month | £21 | £22.70 | Not available |
| 90 days/ 3 months | £49 | £52.02 | £39 |
| 180 days/ 6months | £89 | £99.88 | £70 |
As you can see, the prices for ATPL Online are towards the higher end (but not the most expensive) and compared to the lowest cost provider included in this comparison, you are paying roughly 20-30% more for ATPL Online.
They also do not offer a free ATPL questions and answers trial.
ATPL Online Price: 13/20
ATPL Online Question explanations
Question explanations are probably one of the toughest areas for any question bank as writing question explanations is time-consuming and expensive!
I picked Met, Climatology learning objective at random – as this is probably the area that I needed the most explanations for.
I won’t share screenshots of the ATPL questions and explanations as I do not want to infringe on copyright. ATPL Online has some good explanations.
What I found was amongst some good question explanations, there were also questions that did not have explanations and instead provided the user with a link to purchase the original textbook from Padpilot.
This is OK, but I guess if using the ATPL Online question bank as a last-minute revision tool, you need all the information immediately available to you, i.e. you get a question wrong, you need a quick memory pointer as to what the correct answer is and why.
Perhaps, the questions explanation issues were isolated to Met? I then looked in Flight Planning and for this exercise, picked fuel planning. Every one of the fuel questions that I clicked on did not have explanations.
ATPL Online Question Explanations: 10/20
How interactive is ATPL Online question bank for exam feedback and explanations?
What I liked was that you could flag questions and you can also search directly by question number. The area that would offer an improved user experience to the question bank would be to have live ‘student comments’ that could be added to enhance the explanations.
Also, a flag to show and search by recently seen similar exam questions would be a good feature to have.
ATPL Online interactive explanation and exam feedback: 13/20
ATPL Online Support and customer service
In my interactions with ATPL Online support team in arranging access and time of response was excellent. If you need any support from them relating to your account I am sure you will get a really good response.
ATPL Online support and customer service: 20/20
ATPL Online Overall?
I think this is a good and capable question bank. Would I be comfortable using this question bank in isolation? For the bulk of my study, it would be fine.
I would probably want to use one of the other question banks in addition to ATPL Online as a cross-check and get the latest information with regards to recently seen exam questions.
As a last-minute revision tool, I would also want a question bank with more inbuilt explanations to save me the time of having to go back into textbooks.
Thank you to all the team at ATPL Online for allowing me to conduct this review. don’t forget to visit ATPL Online (https://atplonline.co) if you wish to sign up.
If you have any questions about the ATPL Online question bank, please leave a comment in the section below – I would love to hear from you!
Kudzi Chikohora is a B737 pilot with over 2,500 hours of flying in Europe. He holds a Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, is a chartered engineer, and is a member of the Royal Aeronautical Society.
Kudzi completed his pilot training via the self-funded modular pilot training route and created kcthepilot.com to share pilot training and aviation content.
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