General fundamentals

[JustinHEMI05]

This is for those that have been through, taught or have knowledge of their plant's licensed operator general fundamentals program.

How is your program run?

Is it strictly taught to the NRC exam bank? Do you have something more on top of that? Are your weekly exams out of the bank? Etc. I am basically looking for a general feel as to how the rest of the industry sees GF.

At Peach Bottom, they strictly teach to the exam bank. The weekly exams are out of the bank and they encourage reading the bank a few times.

At Beaver, they use the General Physics program and have their own in house banks, and don't like encouraging people to read the NRC bank. In fact, their weekly exams contain up to 30% (so far) questions on topics that aren't even in the K/A catalog, or above the importance cutoff for the GF exam.

So I have experienced two different programs, and would like to hear others experience.

Thanks!

[DDMurray]

This is for those that have been through, taught or have knowledge of their plant's licensed operator general fundamentals program.

How is your program run?

Is it strictly taught to the NRC exam bank? Do you have something more on top of that? Are your weekly exams out of the bank? Etc. I am basically looking for a general feel as to how the rest of the industry sees GF.

At Peach Bottom, they strictly teach to the exam bank. The weekly exams are out of the bank and they encourage reading the bank a few times.

At Beaver, they use the General Physics program and have their own in house banks, and don't like encouraging people to read the NRC bank. In fact, their weekly exams contain up to 30% (so far) questions on topics that aren't even in the K/A catalog, or above the importance cutoff for the GF exam.

So I have experienced two different programs, and would like to hear others experience.

Thanks!

At Watts Bar, we have used PTT (a contractor) for the past 3 or 4 classes.  He uses the GP stuff but has added his own notes and problem solving techniques.  His exams come mostly from the exam bank but he often modifies them to discourage rote memorization of the bank.  

Here's a link: http://www.pttinc.com/

We have had 100% pass rate since PTT started teaching GFES.

[Cycoticpenguin]

I'll ask some instructors at work to see how they do it.

[JustinHEMI05]

At Watts Bar, we have used PTT (a contractor) for the past 3 or 4 classes.  He uses the GP stuff but has added his own notes and problem solving techniques.  His exams come mostly from the exam bank but he often modifies them to discourage rote memorization of the bank.  

Here's a link: http://www.pttinc.com/

We have had 100% pass rate since PTT started teaching GFES.

I agree with modified exam bank questions.

Thank you for the info.

[Neutron_Herder]

This is for those that have been through, taught or have knowledge of their plant's licensed operator general fundamentals program.

How is your program run?

Is it strictly taught to the NRC exam bank? Do you have something more on top of that? Are your weekly exams out of the bank? Etc. I am basically looking for a general feel as to how the rest of the industry sees GF.

At Peach Bottom, they strictly teach to the exam bank. The weekly exams are out of the bank and they encourage reading the bank a few times.

At Beaver, they use the General Physics program and have their own in house banks, and don't like encouraging people to read the NRC bank. In fact, their weekly exams contain up to 30% (so far) questions on topics that aren't even in the K/A catalog, or above the importance cutoff for the GF exam.

So I have experienced two different programs, and would like to hear others experience.

Thanks!

We use the GP material and have a contractor come in to teach.  The weekly quizzes are mainly exam bank (or slightly modified) with some upper level comprehensive type questions that he generated.  Same thing for the comp exams for each subject area.

We also spend quite a bit of time in the exam bank.  We'd have class until 2 or 3, and then the rest of the day was ours to work on the exam bank questions for that subject.  Then we'd spend the next morning going through any questions that we had problems with the night before.

Once we finished all of the areas, we spent two weeks taking practice GFES exams.  One in the morning under normal test conditions, do exam review, and then an afternoon exam done at your own pace which we went over the next day before our next test.

The audit exam was a mix of exam bank, modified exam bank, and higher level questions.

All in all I thought it was really good.  We spent a lot of time in the exam bank, but we also learned a lot more of the theory behind the questions, and how to apply the principles in different ways.  That part actually saved my butt on the real test, as one of the new questions asked for something that we'd never had to go through before.

[Benwah033]

At FitzPatrick our GFE is taught by in-house instructors or contractors hired by the plant (ex-trainers or licensed operators from Fitz or Nine Mile) who teach to the curriculum set up by the site Ops training dept.

We were taught from General Physics texts, but concluded each lesson with a review of misc exam bank questions.  Weekly exams were 90% exam bank, 10% modified exam bank.  Topics that didn't have K/A values, but that were covered in the GP lesson plans, were de-emphasized.

Self studying exam bank questions was highly encouraged, but mere memorization of answers was discouraged.