moving forward??

The questions in question were indeed the controller and fuel defect questions. By Friday we had convinced the staff that the controller question was OK, and when the “interim exam key” came out excepting both answers, the whole issue became mute.

There are several differences in the Navy and commercial schools of thought and one was illustrated by the exam. The commercial industry does not mathematically include the terms for reactivity addition and source neutrons in the reactor period equation. One of my esteemed classmates is in the process of getting his masters degree in nuclear engineering and is familiar with derivation of the period equation. He agrees that several of the misunderstandings that our other classmates had would have been avoided had these factors been included. The other part of this issue is that the commercial industry (at lease here) stresses reactor period vice SUR for their classroom instruction and testing. This leads to inaccuracies in conceptualization for questions like the effect of changing the average effective delayed neutron fraction over core life. Using the SUR equation, it is easy to see this effect, using reactor period is more difficult.

As for this particular exam, I did get a 98%. Please believe me when I say that I am not bragging. If you can pass NPS and get thru NPTU, you should be able to ace this exam. I have a particular problem of often answering overly simple questions completely wrong. I call this “head in ass syndrome” and did a great job overcoming it during this phase of training. I started with missing an average of 3 questions to this syndrome per exam to 1. This is not perfect but a marked improvement.

This morning we started the systems portion of the training process with some basic print reading and some test taking techniques. At the outset it would seem that these topics would have been more effective prior to the GFES exams but they are painfully in depth for our plant. Once again, if you have ever been at the schematic level in a tech manual, you can make this work. Right now I’m just trying to stay awake……