Long time lurker. I took the
OAR yesterday and scored a
52. Not as great as some others on this site but I am satisfied with it. I doubt I will have much to say that others have not already said but I'll post what I can.
I used
Barron's Military Flight Aptitude Tests and
Aegis Group Complete ASTB Study Guide.
As others have said, Barron's was a good starting point and is certainly worth checking out. The Aegis Group one was alright for the mechanical portion but is not very useful for the math portion. It has a lot of very basic information about concepts you learned in middle school and high school but it doesn't get into some of the more complex questions you will encounter in the actual test. It's practice questions were much more intense than the information it gives you and actually had some mistakes in the questions. It was useful for the mechanical section and was actually more comprehensive than the Barron's book was. I would just stick with Barron's and the resources on this site but the
Aegis Group was somewhat useful for the mechanical section, I was glad to have it but still wouldn't recommend that someone buy it, if that makes sense.
I took advantage of a lot of the flashcards available online, using them to figure out what I needed to work on. I also made my own flashcards with the flashcards.io app. It lets you check a box if you get a card wrong and then you can focus on the one's you missed, which was useful. Otherwise I mostly just used what was on this site. I studied every day or every few days (depending on my school schedule) for around 2 months before the test.
Advice about each test
in the order that I took it:
Math: As a couple people have mentioned, you will have some basic formulas available to you in a tab on the side of the screen. These formulas include things like the formula for the Circumference of a Circle, which was a question I had. So focus on actually practicing doing a lot of the basic equations instead of just memorizing them. There were questions about simplifying equations, so learn things like FOIL or whatever method works for you. I had questions regarding people going different speeds at different parts of a journey and figuring out their average speed. I actually didn't have any "work together" questions, which was unfortunate because I had gotten quite good at those. I didn't receive any log or matrices questions, which probably says something about how I did on this section. This was easily my weakest area.
Reading: Obviously dry stuff. Just don't make any assumptions that aren't actually in the reading. Maybe you
know that Mount Everest is in the southern Himalayas, but did the reading itself tell you that or infer it? If not, you should not pick that answer. A lot of the harder ones were about training programs in the Department of Defense, I figured that it was a good thing if I was reading those.
Mechanical: As others have said, mostly concepts. I only had one actual math problem and it was super simple stuff about weight on a lever. I didn't actually have any questions about different types of levers. It is mostly logic. There were a lot of "which would hit the ground first" questions (a bullet is fired out of a rifle towards the ground at the same time a bullet is dropped, which hits the ground first? A big rock and small rock are dropped at the same time... etc). I did have a question about control rods in a Nuclear Reactor so learn what those do. I did not have any questions about circuits. I did have questions about water flowing through tight places and air flow around the wings of a plane. Know Bernoulli's Effect. I want to clarify that I am saying effect, not equation. Maybe someone who does better on it will get a question about the equation but prioritize knowing the effect itself, as a concept, first. Lastly, obviously, Newton's Laws. Gravity was a big part of my test.
That is what I got, I will add to this if I remember something later. Pretty much everything I said has been posted before so the best way to anticipate what will be on the test is to go back 50 pages and just read. I didn't do amazing so I probably didn't get a lot of the more complex questions, so please look around to find those if you think you will do well. But I will say, prioritize the basics. There is no reason to spend hours studying logs and matrices if you don't have the basics down because you won't get those questions anyway. Lastly, don't panic, relax. Take a minute in between tests to breathe deeply, do some jumping jacks (studies show that exercise improves test performance, also eat something, I am an education major, I know this stuff) or meditate. You will do just fine.
Also, if all else fails:
