Thought I would make a quick post as I just took the ASTB-E for the first time yesterday. Because of some computer issues I wasn’t able to do anything but the OAR, and need to come back in 2 days to do all of the PBM stuff and the UAV test. However, with about 2 weeks of studying, I was able to get an 80 (the maximum allowed score) on the OAR, which was honestly a complete surprise. Based on this score I obviously won’t be retaking the test unless I somehow completely bomb the PBM.
About 25% of my math questions were on cube roots, radicals, and fractional exponents, which I hadn’t studied at all for, but instead of just guessing I started plugging each answer into the equation which I assume helped my score quite a bit. The reading was extremely difficult as all of my passages were naval documents with words I had never seen before, and all of the provided answers were extremely similar in wording. It seemed like this portion went on forever and I was given easily 2-3 times as many questions as any other section. The mechanical portion had a few questions I hadn’t even considered to study like “If Jim heats a metal ring with a 4” hole and then cools it back down, how big will the hole be?” And “if there is a strip with two metals side by side and when it it is heated metal A expands faster, which direction will the strip bend?”. I ended up just guessing on those. For the aviation portion, I had one or two extremely simple aviation history questions and the rest were on parts of a plane and principles of aerodynamics with one question on airspace. The nautical portion was also extremely simple with almost all of the questions being about boat terms, and all of the terms were on the flash cards I studied. The aviation/nautical portion was also extremely short and I only got maybe 10 questions max covering both topics.
To study, I studied 3 different people’s gouges (that I’ll post) as well as an FAA handbook I bought on Amazon. This forum has been a great help as this is where I found all of the study materials.