I took it a few months ago, 8/7/8, OAR 65, so I don't remember a lot of the questions. Best tips I could give is to go through all of the google drive gouges posted here and print out the material. There are a lot of duplicates so just keep track, it'll be too much paper if you print out everything. Second thing is that when you're studying, circle the questions you get wrong. Then go over the material a second time and write down in a notebook, the steps or forumlas (mostly for physics but some for math) that you need to take to solve that particular problem. The barrons book will help you with the mechanical/physics section and the aviation knowledge. It's useless for math (way way too easy) and reading (passage format is not similar to the exams).
Math: Harder than I expected. The study guides that helped the most were "Petersons Practice Test 4: Arithmetic Reasoning" and the "OAR Math Practice Guide" by Carlos Miro. You can find it in Kyles ASTB study guide's math section. In general, understand logs, exponents and radicals and how to solve a complex equation involving potentially all 3 of them. Understand probability, series/sequences and some basic statistics.
Reading: Dry, boring. You may get repeated passages if you take the ASTB more than once. Read some Navy documents of this form (
https://www.public.navy.mil/bupers-...ions/BUPERSInstructions/Documents/1001.40.pdf ). Read the question first, then look for the answer in the passage.
Mech: Easiest section, do the gouge material. Write down, memorize and understand where the forumlas come from that you will need to use during the exam. You'll do fine if you put in the work for this section before hand.
ANIT: Read the cram flashcards, read the Barrons books section on aviation and read a few chapters of the FAA handbook (no need to know the more complicated stuff in the book). Can be pretty random, I read the entire FAA book and thought I was doing horrible on this section.
NATFI: Just be honest here, you can answer the questions according to the bad/good personality traits for pilots listed in the FAA handbook but I suggest not to. It'll be too hard to keep track (they seem to repeat questions) and you'll waste time/brain power thinking about which traits they're looking for. I almost felt like it wouldn't really effect the score if I had picked entirely different answers than the ones I did.
UAV: Watch the Youtube compass trick video, I'm sure you've all seen it posted here before. Then practice the UAV flashcards a few times. Do it quickly, as quick as you possibly can without error, even a few extra seconds can hurt your score. It may not feel like a big difference between 10 seconds and 4 seconds, but this portion seems to care about the time a lot.
PBM: Hardest section. For the listening, zero in on the ear you're told to (I titlted my head towards the right if it was the right ear lol). This will be redundant but forget about the ear you're supposed to ignore. I played War Thunder in prep for the rest. I bought a thrustmaster controller. During the exam, when you push forward on the throttle (the left part of the controller) the crosshair moves up, and when you pull the throttle towards you the crosshair moves down. For the joystick (the right part of the controller), pushing the joystick forward moves the crosshair down and pulling the joystick towards you moves the crosshair up. Right down the emergency procedures controls before that section starts so that you don't forgot them. Just try to do your best here and don't panic or give up if you think you're doing bad (note: everyone probably thinks they're doing bad on this section).
Good luck!
