FloridaExport
New Member
Is there legal record of you using marijuana and did you tell your recruiter
edit: congrats on the score
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1,001 questions about the ASTB (post your scores & ask your questions here!)
- Thread starter edato
- Start date
edit: congrats on the score
No legal record, but already told my recruiter. Thank you.
FloridaExport
New Member
Good luck on getting the waiver, remember only you know how many times you've done it.
I'm assuming that you are NROTC due to your sub draft question. Have you spoken to your aviation advisor at the NROTC? He/she will be able to tell you what percentage get drafted subs based on degree and GPA. You should definitely do better on a 2nd test...just make sure you study to improve your scores.
Just finished my first ASTB today. 68/9/9/9, submitting for SNA as soon as my medical clears.
Very happy with my numbers, obviously, but if there's one thing you get out of this post, it's that you should READ THIS THREAD AND USE AS MUCH OF IT AS YOU HAVE TIME FOR! I'm a liberal arts major with zero flying experience, I last took a math and physics class in my senior year of high school four years ago. Despite that, the study guides and gouge here were enough to let me breeze through the math and physics section of the OAR, and the simulators and gouge on ANIT and PBM helped me kick ass on both of those too.
The vast majority of posters on here give great advice on all sections, although there are a few small points I disagree with primarily on PBM strategies that I'll outline later. Don't take my word uncritically just because I scored high, though - I have no earlier test strategies or scores to compare against. I might be totally wrong about why I did well.
By section:
Math: I got kicked out pretty early after questions started getting really complicated. There were a few that I genuinely did not know and had to make an educated guess at. Probably my worst OAR section, but to be expected.
-Exponents, exponents, exponents. There were multiple big scary simplification questions where my heart sank when I saw the equation - until I realized 90% of the simplification was actually just super arithmetic of adding, multiplying, and dividing exponents. If you know what to do with exponents by heart, seemingly impossible questions that the adaptive system is giving you as hard ones become a cakewalk.
-Matrix multiplication: Quite honestly, I don't know how the hell you do this, and I didn't actually study it, but I got a question on it. Not sure if I guessed right, my guess was entirely vibes based. Don't leave it up to a 25% coin flip like I did, learn your matrix multiplication!
-Speaking of 25%, probability was another big one. Multiple dice questions, I.E. what's the probability of getting a certain number when rolling two dice. Remember that there are 36 outcomes when rolling two dice, so your answer should be a fraction of 36!
Reading: I thought everyone saying that they just got genuinely bored and had to force themselves to stay focused was exaggerating. They weren't, it's just that bad, and I read philosophy for fun. Finished with some time to spare.
-Process of elimination is your best friend. Oftentimes a passage will say something like "Person X may authorize Person Y to perform Function Z", and one of the trick answers will be "Person X must tell Person Y to perform Function Z", just with the words scrambled a little. Cut out anything that says something super specific not explicitly authorized by the text, and often you'll be left with only one vague answer that the text actually supports.
-It's a lot of Navy regulations and jargon. Knowing the commands and people and procedures it's talking about isn't important, because it's all snippets out of context, but learn what stuff like "May, must, should", etc. mean in Navy document speak and you should be fine.
Mechanics: I busted my ass doing practice numerical problems on gravitational acceleration, the exact force needed to lift a really complicated set of pulleys, etc. That was a lot of stress for nothing. All of my problems weren't about doing calculations on that stuff, but knowing the principles behind physics questions - what do pulleys do in a general case, what's convection, what's the Doppler effect, etc. All I can say is that you should get an overview of the very basic rules of the physical world you might learn in high school and know generally how physics manifests in simple real world situations.
ANIT: Read the FAA pilot's handbook. Know some basic stuff about the parts of a ship. This section was heavily biased towards aviation information for me, with only a scattering of nautical stuff at the start. The ASTB Prep App on the app store's ANIT section more than prepared me for most of this, the rest I could get by on by just having read a lot about military aviation history.
NAFTI: I dunno? Answer honestly. If you honestly can't choose between two, think about which choice would serve you better as a Navy pilot. I.E., being someone who usually knows how much gas their car has is presumably pretty damn important, because forgetting your fuel state as a pilot means crashing millions of dollars of government hardware.
UAV: ASTB prep app, again. I practiced the compass method described elsewhere in this thread, I was down to 1.5 seconds and accurate on the app. And then I psyched myself out on the real test and missed 3-4. Whoops! But I guess this goes to show that you can make up ground in other PBM sections if you aren't perfect on the UAV.
Dichotic Listening: Absolutely knocked this one out of the park, both alone and when combined with stick/throttle. ASTB Prep App has a perfect simulator for anyone who wants to practice it. For me, prior experience made this trivial. Not really a realistic study option, but I've played ARMA 3 with the "Task Force Arrowhead Radio" and "ACRE2" mods for a long time, and listening to a radio net in each ear in that game while someone's yapping on the other net in your other ear is a much harder dichotic listening task than what the ASTB requires. I guess play some ARMA if you have a lot of time to study?
Stick and Throttle: USE JANTZEN'S SIM! It's an amazing resource. I did not buy a stick+throttle, but even mouse+keyboard practice on Jantzen's prepared me well for the PBM. My recruiting station's stick was ass, it kept introducing different drift throughout the different practice sessions and iterations of stick + throttle. Luckily, because I had practiced on Jantzen's sim at max difficulty, tracking the yellow plane was easier in the real thing than in practice, and that helped offset the stick difficulties. IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER ABOUT JANTZEN'S SIM: The dichotic listening practice in the sim scores you incorrectly. In the real test, regardless of your active ear, if you hear even in the active ear you hit trigger, if you hear odd in the active ear you hit clutch. Just do this while practicing with Jantzen's sim, and ignore the score it gives you for the dichotic practice. The muscle memory helps.
Emergency Procedures: Writing down a checklist is good info, I did so myself. However, only use your checklist if you forget the procedure, and try to keep the procedure in your head if possible. Also, others have advised just forgetting your tracking until you clear the emergency, and then going back to tracking. I would recommend against this, after all you have a HOTAS and all the buttons needed to clear an emergency only require your thumb and index finger. I kept tracking while I cleared, not sure how much of a difference it made.
Terrain Recognition: This was the one I worried most about. It's pretty hard! The method I ended up using was using my pencil to find a straight up-down line between two points on the right side image, then laid my pencil across those two points in the original image, using the resulting angle as my heading. Not sure how well I did, but you can practice this in the ASTB Prep App.
Besides the ASTB Prep App (I completed every section of it, alongside testing myself and running the simulations over and over) and Jantezn's sim, I also scanned Kyle's and Gomez's drives posted elsewhere in this thread and did a few worksheets from them. Cannot recommend the ASTB Prep App enough, it was absolutely worth the money. Don't be scared off by the price tag.
Very happy with my numbers, obviously, but if there's one thing you get out of this post, it's that you should READ THIS THREAD AND USE AS MUCH OF IT AS YOU HAVE TIME FOR! I'm a liberal arts major with zero flying experience, I last took a math and physics class in my senior year of high school four years ago. Despite that, the study guides and gouge here were enough to let me breeze through the math and physics section of the OAR, and the simulators and gouge on ANIT and PBM helped me kick ass on both of those too.
The vast majority of posters on here give great advice on all sections, although there are a few small points I disagree with primarily on PBM strategies that I'll outline later. Don't take my word uncritically just because I scored high, though - I have no earlier test strategies or scores to compare against. I might be totally wrong about why I did well.
By section:
Math: I got kicked out pretty early after questions started getting really complicated. There were a few that I genuinely did not know and had to make an educated guess at. Probably my worst OAR section, but to be expected.
-Exponents, exponents, exponents. There were multiple big scary simplification questions where my heart sank when I saw the equation - until I realized 90% of the simplification was actually just super arithmetic of adding, multiplying, and dividing exponents. If you know what to do with exponents by heart, seemingly impossible questions that the adaptive system is giving you as hard ones become a cakewalk.
-Matrix multiplication: Quite honestly, I don't know how the hell you do this, and I didn't actually study it, but I got a question on it. Not sure if I guessed right, my guess was entirely vibes based. Don't leave it up to a 25% coin flip like I did, learn your matrix multiplication!
-Speaking of 25%, probability was another big one. Multiple dice questions, I.E. what's the probability of getting a certain number when rolling two dice. Remember that there are 36 outcomes when rolling two dice, so your answer should be a fraction of 36!
Reading: I thought everyone saying that they just got genuinely bored and had to force themselves to stay focused was exaggerating. They weren't, it's just that bad, and I read philosophy for fun. Finished with some time to spare.
-Process of elimination is your best friend. Oftentimes a passage will say something like "Person X may authorize Person Y to perform Function Z", and one of the trick answers will be "Person X must tell Person Y to perform Function Z", just with the words scrambled a little. Cut out anything that says something super specific not explicitly authorized by the text, and often you'll be left with only one vague answer that the text actually supports.
-It's a lot of Navy regulations and jargon. Knowing the commands and people and procedures it's talking about isn't important, because it's all snippets out of context, but learn what stuff like "May, must, should", etc. mean in Navy document speak and you should be fine.
Mechanics: I busted my ass doing practice numerical problems on gravitational acceleration, the exact force needed to lift a really complicated set of pulleys, etc. That was a lot of stress for nothing. All of my problems weren't about doing calculations on that stuff, but knowing the principles behind physics questions - what do pulleys do in a general case, what's convection, what's the Doppler effect, etc. All I can say is that you should get an overview of the very basic rules of the physical world you might learn in high school and know generally how physics manifests in simple real world situations.
ANIT: Read the FAA pilot's handbook. Know some basic stuff about the parts of a ship. This section was heavily biased towards aviation information for me, with only a scattering of nautical stuff at the start. The ASTB Prep App on the app store's ANIT section more than prepared me for most of this, the rest I could get by on by just having read a lot about military aviation history.
NAFTI: I dunno? Answer honestly. If you honestly can't choose between two, think about which choice would serve you better as a Navy pilot. I.E., being someone who usually knows how much gas their car has is presumably pretty damn important, because forgetting your fuel state as a pilot means crashing millions of dollars of government hardware.
UAV: ASTB prep app, again. I practiced the compass method described elsewhere in this thread, I was down to 1.5 seconds and accurate on the app. And then I psyched myself out on the real test and missed 3-4. Whoops! But I guess this goes to show that you can make up ground in other PBM sections if you aren't perfect on the UAV.
Dichotic Listening: Absolutely knocked this one out of the park, both alone and when combined with stick/throttle. ASTB Prep App has a perfect simulator for anyone who wants to practice it. For me, prior experience made this trivial. Not really a realistic study option, but I've played ARMA 3 with the "Task Force Arrowhead Radio" and "ACRE2" mods for a long time, and listening to a radio net in each ear in that game while someone's yapping on the other net in your other ear is a much harder dichotic listening task than what the ASTB requires. I guess play some ARMA if you have a lot of time to study?
Stick and Throttle: USE JANTZEN'S SIM! It's an amazing resource. I did not buy a stick+throttle, but even mouse+keyboard practice on Jantzen's prepared me well for the PBM. My recruiting station's stick was ass, it kept introducing different drift throughout the different practice sessions and iterations of stick + throttle. Luckily, because I had practiced on Jantzen's sim at max difficulty, tracking the yellow plane was easier in the real thing than in practice, and that helped offset the stick difficulties. IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER ABOUT JANTZEN'S SIM: The dichotic listening practice in the sim scores you incorrectly. In the real test, regardless of your active ear, if you hear even in the active ear you hit trigger, if you hear odd in the active ear you hit clutch. Just do this while practicing with Jantzen's sim, and ignore the score it gives you for the dichotic practice. The muscle memory helps.
Emergency Procedures: Writing down a checklist is good info, I did so myself. However, only use your checklist if you forget the procedure, and try to keep the procedure in your head if possible. Also, others have advised just forgetting your tracking until you clear the emergency, and then going back to tracking. I would recommend against this, after all you have a HOTAS and all the buttons needed to clear an emergency only require your thumb and index finger. I kept tracking while I cleared, not sure how much of a difference it made.
Terrain Recognition: This was the one I worried most about. It's pretty hard! The method I ended up using was using my pencil to find a straight up-down line between two points on the right side image, then laid my pencil across those two points in the original image, using the resulting angle as my heading. Not sure how well I did, but you can practice this in the ASTB Prep App.
Besides the ASTB Prep App (I completed every section of it, alongside testing myself and running the simulations over and over) and Jantezn's sim, I also scanned Kyle's and Gomez's drives posted elsewhere in this thread and did a few worksheets from them. Cannot recommend the ASTB Prep App enough, it was absolutely worth the money. Don't be scared off by the price tag.
FloridaExport
New Member
Bit of a niche question so if this isn’t the right thread please lmk.
I need LASIK and I’m wondering if I should do it before or after I take the ASTB.
I know that once I get LASIK I’ll need to wait 6 months for MEPS.
If I get I-SEL (hopeful I know) will me needing waiting to get LASIK or having to wait for MEPS would put that at risk.
Haven’t told my recruiter and wondering what would happen with each situation.
I need LASIK and I’m wondering if I should do it before or after I take the ASTB.
I know that once I get LASIK I’ll need to wait 6 months for MEPS.
If I get I-SEL (hopeful I know) will me needing waiting to get LASIK or having to wait for MEPS would put that at risk.
Haven’t told my recruiter and wondering what would happen with each situation.
exNavyOffRec
Well-Known Member
Take the ASTB if ready.
If you are going for SNFO your vision doesn't have to be perfect, if you are going for SNA and you know your vision isn't within limits then you won't be medically cleared and therefore cannot apply for SNA so ISEL isn't an issue until after you get your vision corrected.