As almost an outside observer, I find this both interesting and perhaps a bit concerning.

Are we really saying that UK wide we only need to replace less than 100 folk a year, who are competent to design erect and verify an electrical installation ?

To me this seems very low - even if each successful candidate then goes on to have  a 40- 50 year working life with that knowledge, then this imlies there are only a few thousand such competent folk working in the UK at any one time, a fraction of the total -which still seems low.

Or perhaps the qualification is not really needed, perhaps is overly theoretical or in other ways difficult (but reading the examiners comments, it does not seem so - understanding ADS and being able to decide the cable size to use in a given case ought to be bread and butter stuff, and not being able to is a reasonable ground for losing marks, indeed failing.

So maybe there is another discouraging factor - the cost, not enough exam time, a requirement to wear fancy dress to take the exam or something ?

And,  what are the other folk calling themselves 'electricians' doing, if not installing and verifying things they have designed ? And, then do we know how well/ badly are they doing it ?

So why so few candidates and then why so few pass?

It seems a lot of effort and excessive secrecy to put on a full exam nationwide for what is less than one lecture theatre   full of candidates from all over the whole country.

I am not sure of the significance of Chris's comment that an exam is summative rather than formative,and I'd like to be

To me all knowledge is worth acquiring, and if the aim of the exam is to demonstrate that  a candidate understands the topic there are many ways to achieve that - is the problem that the failures do not understand, or that the exam does not let them demonstrate their ability?

I have no answers but the numbers suggest right now this is really a dead duck of an exam, both for the C and G, and worse for most of the folk investing their hard earnt dosh into taking it, - and yet Lyle must be doing something very different, and I suggest very right, because his students actually pass.

So perhaps if this skill  is not to  fade away, replaced by Amtech or something, the effort needs to be to train the (other) trainers first so they also know what target their students are supposed to be aiming at rather than where they currently are.

Mike

mapj1 said:

I am not sure of the significance of Chris's comment that an exam is summative rather than formative

I simply repeated what the Open University has to say. So tutor marked assignments have to be submitted every few weeks and are returned with feedback. They are formative inasmuch as students are intended to learn from their mistakes (or celebrate their successes).

End of module assignments are similar, but feedback is limited to a grade (distinction, merit, etc) for each question. There are also traditional exams, but since covid, they are done at home and, I suspect will continue that way to save the cost of renting exam halls. The aims are different: (1) has the student acquired the appropriate knowledge; (2) can the student regurgitate it; (3) is the regurgitation in the required format?

Providing feedback would increase the workload of the examiners/assessors considerably and of course there is an argument that on completion of an exam, the course has finished.

"And,  what are the other folk calling themselves 'electricians' doing, if not installing and verifying things they have designed ? And, then do we know how well/ badly are they doing it ?

So why so few candidates and then why so few pass?"

The lack of understanding of design is clearly seen on any site. 'Gold Card' electricians think they know everything. Very few do. A lack of good Supervisors is allowing 'basic' electricians carry on doing their shoddy work, whcih thye think is correct. One I witnessed - when queried about not earthing the SWA between plastic boxes feeding multiple outside lights, the answer was there is a third core that does the earthing! 4 'electricians' were doing that on a site that only allowed 'Gold Card' holders.

Go onto any of the multiple Facebook UK electrical sites, and you will see so called electricians asking the most basic of questions in regard to safety, they just do not have a clue, then some of the answers are equally appalling. Tell them that you can run a double socket outlet on a single 2.5mm cable with a 32A circuit breaker (+RCD), and there will be meltdown, with replies from you're an idiot to you shouldnt even say such things as its unsafe, then point them to the standard circuit details in the appendix, where it is clearly shown that a socket is supplied by a 2.5mm cable, and they still dont beleive it!

Basically, the workforce is poor, and doesnt want to learn any more than is essential. thats some go on to fail the ~5 yearly BS7671 exam shows how poor their knowledge is. When they learn that a pass rate is 50% or lower for 2396, they will not want to even try it, it is a mindset, the only people who do it are those who think they will learn from it, and from those results, it appears many are not ready to go that next step and actually work things out themselves.

2396 was one of those exams that , although open book, I found that experience was the biggest factor. I dont think most people under 25, who have been in the industry for 9 years or so will have the relevant experience to undertake the exam. For 5 of those years ,most will have been in a quite protected environment, where they are apprentices, and limited in their work experience. Only the later years, when they are let loose alone are they being called on to actually think about things, rather than just doing things as instructed. For those who only work in a domestic envirnment, they have no chance, the same goes for those who only work in one environment.

Myself, I had a varied start, firstly in heavy engineering, where everthing was conduit and trunking, with no CPCs, we just tapped off the trunking to get an earth, but tell that to youngsters now and they dont believe it, and say I'm lying, as 'you need a cpc to every point'. Basic understanding has not been taught, though getting through an exam has been, apprentices I've had have done great in their exams, yet struggle in the real world.

 Employers dont help. They want a Gold Card. Thats it. Yet that proves little if the work I see has anything to go by. If you have 2391, you dont get any more pay, and 2396 doesnt get a rise either for an installation electrician. Self employed people dont benefit financially either, so it will be difficult to persuade people to do it, when their reward will be a certificate,and a fee of ~£1000, but no incentive in their pay packet, unless they work for a large Company who can see the benefit of having educated workers.

C+G should make 2396 a high point for Electricians. Currently, there are not that many who have 2391 (last I heard, that had been toned down from 20 years ago, making it not so hard to pass), so getting people to do 2396 is difficult, but a concerted effort to promote 2391 and 2396 as its natural progression should be the aim. And extra pay for those who have it, but that isnt going to happen when you have people who have just got their Gold Card willing to work for £16/hr.

Thank you for the reply, though I am clearly having a dense moment, as I am wondering what is being summed and what be being formed, for surely if this refers to the accumulation of critical thinking and understanding in the head of the candidate then it cannot be forming without the addition of new information.

It is not directly related bur the comparison between university education and the City and Guilds type is very marked. I should admit say I know far more about the former, having not only been a university student, but also a later a research fellow, lab demonstrator, and leading the occasional tutorials.  I have however never been paid to lecture ;-)

In contrast in my dealings with C &G I have only ever been a candidate, and mostly that was in the last century.

I am not sure how much learning should be pushed, as it is during the lower years at school where you sit still and are taught by someone who knows more about it than you, and how much should be the student pulling, where the student is  interested enough to go and pull together information from many sources and will end up knowing  more than, or if not more then at least some combination of information that is not the same as anyone else's including the tutors/lectures/professors of the faculty in which they are studying, This allows that person to draw their own unique insights, which may well be truly original. Or you may think they are until they are found in some obscure paper from the other side of the planet from 20 years ago.

Clearly as the academic level rises, then the latter method should dominate - after all at the top of the game there is no-one any more expert to ask if you wanted to ;-) let alone be taught by, but the correct point to outgrow teachers seems to vary by individual.

I suspect in both sorts of institution you get students who get to the end and fail to have absorbed any relevant and useful knowledge, but hopefully not a large fraction in either case.

Equally in terms of hours of study vs cost, C & G looks very pricey, or university very cheap, and I am not sure why. (a £9K course gets you a year of study, and in a science subject  that means several hours of lectures each week, and lots of access to very good library and experimental faculties.  Arts may vary.)

Mike

I hope your experience is unlucky, but if not it chimes with what I meant in my earlier comment as 'concerning' - in the sense that there are not that many folk who are capable of true design and installation in anything other than a cookie cutter step and repeat way, but ideally there would be, as some  of shaky competence are doing it anyway - a 'worst of both worlds' condition.

I have seen the lack of joined up thinking you mention highlighted with even more apparently trivial examples than the double socket- next time you want to embarrass someone, try ' how would one use  the normal rules  to size a set of jump leads for a car, where the starter takes 500A for burst of no more than 10 seconds, with 30 second cooldown between attempts, and an economic cable life of 30 minutes operation total ?'

apparently this is a 'really hard' question that is not electrical at all as it us requiring physics knowledge. Well in the sense that it is neither steady state nor pure adiabatic, yes, but that is not that uncommon, and '7671 allows you to use real knowledge in such cases.

So, in your view, what I called 'concerning' then.

Mike.

The point I wanted to make, but I went on a rant, is that the typical Sparky has done their apprenticeship, passed their AM2, got the Gold Card, now thats it.

They are happy to plod along with the little knowledge they have. They install standard circuits, and do the basic stuff that they can do. If they went on to learn more, and actually do some Design learning, they would realise what a small world they have been living in, and see how poor their judgement was before when installing.

C+G should be promoting this course more, as, it's pretty fundamental to anyone who is putting in a new circuit 'designed' by themselves. And, to be fair, it really isnt that difficult, put the hours in, try to understand it, and it all falls into place. Lyle has shown what pass rate is possible. I did mine with Steve Briggs in Birmingham, (along with Zs who also did it) many years ago (both were regulars on this forum, but only occasionally pop in nowadays), I think Steve had a similar pass rate, in that something like 11 out of 12 passed the exam. No idea about the Project, as we had 6 months to get that in after the exam.

The point I wanted to make, but I went on a rant, is that the typical Sparky has done their apprenticeship, passed their AM2, got the Gold Card, now thats it.

They are happy to plod along with the little knowledge they have. They install standard circuits, and do the basic stuff that they can do. If they went on to learn more, and actually do some Design learning, they would realise what a small world they have been living in, and see how poor their judgement was before when installing.

C+G should be promoting this course more, as, it's pretty fundamental to anyone who is putting in a new circuit 'designed' by themselves. And, to be fair, it really isnt that difficult, put the hours in, try to understand it, and it all falls into place. Lyle has shown what pass rate is possible. I did mine with Steve Briggs in Birmingham, (along with Zs who also did it) many years ago (both were regulars on this forum, but only occasionally pop in nowadays), I think Steve had a similar pass rate, in that something like 11 out of 12 passed the exam. No idea about the Project, as we had 6 months to get that in after the exam.

Fair enough  Alan - as I say in another post I am not too sure what the level is for this one, but it seems from the comments that more folk should be able to, and encouraged  do it. Any one hole in the knowledge is forgivable but a thin lace curtain of knowledge and the ability to use really is not. While folk may be defensive, how many years experience someone has had is a very elastic quantity - the experiences of the same year repeated ten times with only small variations is not the "10 years experience" as someone who has 'been about a bit' and worked in many widely different situations.

And I am not trying to provoke or belittle people, but the low numbers of candidates passing do seem a valid cause for some concern.

Perhaps there is a "train the trainers" problem and C & G should be looking at that.

regards

Mike

(As a side note I am long enough here to recall the posters you refer to and long running and fun debates on the previous forum software, and it really raised the level of discussion above the 'what is the reg no for this' to 'why do we need to assume / consider this effect'  but I also know why folk are now too busy, and the mangled threads on here now too hard to follow to dive in quickly and so use has died off rather. There are surprisingly few of us originals left.)