Finished! 67/8/8/8
I came out thinking this was a "good" score. My recruiter basically said it's a fantastic score and should get me Pilot/SWO even with my GPA of 2.95. He also said there's a chance for Intel, which considering how low my GPA is, that's way better than I ever expected. Maybe my recruiter was exaggerating, but he made me feel like this will more than offset my low GPA.
Time Strategy: Throughout my studying I was worried over the time limit and with the new test it isn't an issue at all. I think previous test versions used time to grade high scores (Person A managed to answer 28 right questions, Person B only got to 27), but this version doesn't need to. If you're killing the test they can ask harder and harder questions until you miss one. Alternatively, if you're failing on geometry they can spend more time and ask you algebra questions to see what you are good at. If your studying indicates you'll only miss a few questions on a section, take your time. I had 15 or less math questions, so each incorrect answer had a pretty big impact. My proctor and my own test seemed to indicate if you're missing questions, you'll have to answer more questions. With a 2hr+ test, fatigue is an issue, so lowering the amount of questions will be beneficial (especially for the flight sim portion later on). My proctor said for the math portion I had 53 seconds per question if every question was asked. Obviously not every question was asked, but it's a good baseline. If a question will take you 5 minutes to solve, you need to cut your losses.
- Important General Advice I haven't seen posted:
YOU GET UNLIMITED UAV PRACTICE: This needs repeating. There's no excuse if you mess up on the UAV portion. The practice session allows unlimited practices and asks the exact same questions you'll get on the real deal. I practiced until I got 100% and every time was under 2 seconds. The practice asks random questions so your brain won't fuck up and go off memory. I also wouldn't use the hand drawn compass others have mentioned on this forum. I tried it once during practice and got a significantly slower time than without. It's hard to explain exactly how I approached this section, but these flashcards have the exact format on them for practice (and they're free!). So you should be able to practice until you can consistently recognize the right answer in 1s giving yourself another second to go through the act of clicking and reorienting to the next uav diagram.
Math: I kind of went into detail on this during my time strategy. Essentially I don't think you'll get asked hard questions unless you're doing well. I've seen people post that they didn't get a log question. I did and it felt harder than the majority of my questions. I won't post specific questions (seriously the Navy is super protective of this test) but some of the questions floating around this forum are the exact same as ones I was asked. They're also usually the harder questions. One question I saw on this forum I didn't understand how to do, looked it up on yahoo.answers and the very same question was on my test. Definitely one of the harder ones I was asked so well worth the time to look it up. The two study guides I'll link below had almost every question type.
- Section Thoughts:
Reading: You know it or you don't. I usually felt like every question had 2 viable answers so I can't say with any certainty how well I did here. Just take your time and reread the passage to make sure your final answer fits.
Mechanics: Again, there's a few of these questions floating around the forum, spend some time going through threads from 2013 onwards (new test version). I was disappointed with how I did here (my major is Mechanical Engineering). I think I did best on math, but it probably should have been this stuffLots of pulley questions for me, nothing unexpected.
Flight/Nautical Information: The study guides I'll link had most of this stuff and I have no prior experience aside from Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 2 back in 2000. So at most I lost 1 point on each stanine portion due to this section with minimal study. Read the study guides, look up stuff on wikipedia, shouldn't be hard.
UAV: Went in depth on this up top.
Flight Sim: Fuck dude. Everyone says they did terribly, and it's true. I'd love to see what someone with 5/5/5 did because mine felt horrible. This section is very similar to the airforce version explained here (airforce has horizontal instead of vertical). Biggest advice is to write stuff down and take your time with directions. Especially for the emergency systems I had the exact responses written down. The screen would flash ENGINE, I'd look down at what my response was supposed to be, execute it then focus on the targeting again. This was good enough for 8/8/8 so there's no real need to memorize responses. The hardest part is your hands will sometimes move in opposite directs to have the same action on the screen. To get the cursors to move up, your right hand will move backwards and your left hand forwards. When I was focusing on just targeting I'd mess this up constantly and move my hands in unison. It felt like I did better at it when I was focusing on listening to the earpiece because then my hands were just on autopilot and did fine on their own.
Study Guide 1 (nelnet also has practice test available with a quick google)
- Guides:
More useful flashcards
Study Guide 2 was a .epub file of "Military Aviation Tests for Dummies" (something like that) that you can find floating around online.
*Oh! Some of the practice tests you can find online (hell even study guides posted by users here) have wrong answers in them for the Math and Mechanical portions. If you think an answer might be wrong, it very well could be.
Good luck! But don't do too good until my boards have convened![]()
I also noticed the significant amount of errors in the study guides posted here. So I mostly ended up to using the guides to show me what types of questions to expect and then went to more official sources.