Hey y'all, it's been said 1,001 times but I definitely appreciate all the help preparing for this exam. Took my ASTB for the first time today and felt like it was a team effort in there. Felt like I nailed the ANIT and Mechanical based on the gouge alone. Math actually caught me off guard a bit, and I made some simple mistakes that I wish I could take back. It's definitely true what everybody says about it being tougher than any practice exams, and the gouge was less useful here. My advice would be to take half a second to think before you click on the answer; early on in the section I remember thinking "Hey the answer's C" and then clicking A because I was moving too fast. Didn't do that again. Overall, I had more luck than I didn't and landed a 7/7/7, which I think is where I'm happy to leave it without risking a retest (only have time for one more).
Don't have much to add to the gouge here, if I saw an ANIT question I recognized on I pulled the trigger pretty quickly. Got the OIF tanker (Hornet) and first deep bomb escort (P-51 Mustang). One that I do remember was "What supplies the spark necessary for combustion in a jet engine?" and I said compression. One of the options for it was something like Magnetus and that threw me off enough to think it could be right. That whole section went super fast.
As for the PBM, I didn't use the compass trick and got three wrong with times ranging from 1.3-2.4s. I think we all stress about the rest of the PBM portion way more than we should, especially when the key is just to keep your cool. I've heard folks complain about the setup a lot, so I was expecting the throttle/joystick/headset to be much harder to use than they were. The vertical axis flip was tougher than I thought at first, but by the time everything was combined I actually felt like I had gotten the hang of it a lot more. I just followed most of the tips everybody has given, focus on the 2-D tracker with the vertical tracker in your periphery, lean into your target ear (which changes quite a few times mid test, but odd and even stay constant), stay calm and know that everybody thinks they're doing worse than they are. The emergency procedures were less intimidating than they sound, but I noticed myself slacking on the tracking when they got called and didn't correct it until the last one. When I was normally holding the throttle, my thumb would be positioned on the "Clutch" button that you used to terminate each procedure, which on the outside edges of it served as one of the dials you have to adjust. Instead during this evolution, I placed my thumb on the other dial to start off with, so that I wouldn't have to move from the clutch dial to the other dial and then back to the clutch. Hadn't seen anybody else make note of that.
Good luck guys!
Don't have much to add to the gouge here, if I saw an ANIT question I recognized on I pulled the trigger pretty quickly. Got the OIF tanker (Hornet) and first deep bomb escort (P-51 Mustang). One that I do remember was "What supplies the spark necessary for combustion in a jet engine?" and I said compression. One of the options for it was something like Magnetus and that threw me off enough to think it could be right. That whole section went super fast.
As for the PBM, I didn't use the compass trick and got three wrong with times ranging from 1.3-2.4s. I think we all stress about the rest of the PBM portion way more than we should, especially when the key is just to keep your cool. I've heard folks complain about the setup a lot, so I was expecting the throttle/joystick/headset to be much harder to use than they were. The vertical axis flip was tougher than I thought at first, but by the time everything was combined I actually felt like I had gotten the hang of it a lot more. I just followed most of the tips everybody has given, focus on the 2-D tracker with the vertical tracker in your periphery, lean into your target ear (which changes quite a few times mid test, but odd and even stay constant), stay calm and know that everybody thinks they're doing worse than they are. The emergency procedures were less intimidating than they sound, but I noticed myself slacking on the tracking when they got called and didn't correct it until the last one. When I was normally holding the throttle, my thumb would be positioned on the "Clutch" button that you used to terminate each procedure, which on the outside edges of it served as one of the dials you have to adjust. Instead during this evolution, I placed my thumb on the other dial to start off with, so that I wouldn't have to move from the clutch dial to the other dial and then back to the clutch. Hadn't seen anybody else make note of that.
Good luck guys!