How to Study for Your MCA Oral Exam.

Failing to plan is planning to fail.

One question that I get all of the time is simply “How do I study for my MCA Oral Exam?” The flippant answer is “a lot” but, to be fair, working out how to study for your MCA oral exam is a new experience for most people.

Whichever ticket you are doing, the amount of information that you’re trying to learn is huge and very wide-ranging.

Unless you plan, it is very easy to follow a root and branch approach to revision, where you head off in a random direction and get further and further into a topic, until you realise that you’ve spent the last three hours learning about the intricacies of type-approval for sewage treatment plants but you’re not entirely sure what SOLAS stands for.

As the exam is often a rather quick dash through a variety of subjects, mostly at rather a high-level (see our “What’s the MCA Oral Exam really like?” blog), it’s super important that you have really strong, high-level answers on all subjects, rather than deep expertise on one and nothing on another.

Whichever ticket you are doing, the amount of information that you’re trying to learn is huge and very wide-ranging.

– Paul Naranjo-Shepherd

So, you need a plan:

1) Take a look at your MCA oral exam syllabus and make a note of all of the topics you can be asked about. However, because the syllabi are rather vague, they are only useful as a high-level summary of what you need to know.

2) Break down each of the topics in your syllabus into bite-size chunks and flesh them out with the detail. As a simplified example, MARPOL > Annex I – Oil > Discharge Requirements > Inside/outside special areas, equipment requirements and record keeping. Go through this exercise for all of the topics and make sure that you use detailed, up-to-date resources, such as our Environmental Regs module, to help you do so. Unfortunately, you can’t blame a random guy’s blog if you’re spouting nonsense in your oral exam.

3) It’s hard to know the kind of detail to go into, so sense-check against the oral reports.  Find as many reports as you can for your syllabus and go through them all. This will be intimidating to start but you’ll soon see that a lot of the questions repeat themselves. You’ll also get a sense of the level of detail in the questions and how much you need to know. Do please take the reports with a pinch of salt though; they are often not the whole story. Here’s a blog post about how to use oral reports or you can head straight to our Facebook groups (Deck and Engine) and dive in.

4) Take your framework and start adding content to it in a methodical way. Start at a high-level and don’t allow yourself to go too deep into the weeds. Then move on and do the same with each section until you have comprehensive notes for all topics.

5) Make your own notes. There are two meanings to this; one, make notes that work for you, using whatever media you prefer, with or without colourful pens, brainstorms, flash cards, etc. Two, although having access to best-in-class, interactive resources is critical, you need make sure that you get them into your head. Making your own notes and flash cards to summarise what you’re learning is really important. Don’t fall into the trap of borrowing someone else’s old notes or buying a set of flashcards and thinking that you’re done.

Concentric circles.

You should now have some awesome revision notes! Yet, our revision also needs to be well-structured and cover everything in the time available. Imagine that your content is arranged in concentric circles, with the most important stuff in the centre, moving out to the least important in the outermost circle. You can even draw this out yourself, if it helps you to visualise it.

If you’re an OOW candidate, COLREGs, buoyage and safety-critical stuff would go in the centre. The next layer would be, say, watchkeeping, passage planning, etc. Then, perhaps, MARPOL & SOLAS. Then, other regulations and, if you’re doing an Unlimited ticket, cargo operations. Use the orals reports to make sure the common subjects are closer to the centre than the infrequent ones.

When you’re revising, start in the centre and work outwards but not just once, do so repeatedly. Keep coming back into the centre to make sure that that core knowledge is solid, even as you move further and further outwards.

Don’t forget it’s an oral exam.

The biggest mistake that I see people make over and over again is forgetting that there are two sides to this revision process; first, learning the information but then also getting it back out again in a way that impresses the Examiner. It’s all very well to have reams of beautifully highlighted notes but if you’re not able to synthesis that information into a coherent sentence on the day, it’s all over.

We work just as hard to get our clients to speak up, shut up, sit up straight and believe in themselves, as we do to teach them the content.

– Paul Naranjo-Shepherd

So you need to make sure that you practice verbalising what you’ve learnt. That’s why we offer both weekly small-group clinics on the COLREGs and General Knowledge content, as well as flexible private sessions where you can work with one of our expert tutors to polish your knowledge and your presentation.

A key difference with the way that we work compared to maritime colleges and other prep providers is that we don’t demand that you sign up to an expensive, lengthy prep course. With Whitehorse, you can have as much or as little support as you need, from a single mock to an intensive oral prep course, so there’s no reason not to give it a try.

Finally, we really are here to help. If you’ve got any questions or doubts, just send us an email or a message using the little chat icon hovering at the bottom of the screen.

Best of luck!

Cheers,

Paul