Howdy, all (longtime reader, firstime contributor)--
Took the (paper) ASTB on Wednesday (don't know how I did yet). Would have posted what I thought earlier, except that airwarriors went down. First off, thanks to everyone posting their guides/gouge (still unclear as to the meaning of "gouge"); as a lot of people have said: you all deserve a beer. No, four.
But. There's a new ASTB. It's not covered entirely by the ARCO book. Things still covered by the ARCO book are: math section, mechanical comp, ANT, and spatial apperception. Not covered: reading comprehension and the...supplemental test (!!).
Firstly, the reading comp is exactly that. No more, no less. No sentance completion, no "find the wrong word and replace with right word," no general word knowledge. Only paragraphs, where your task is to select the most right answer about the paragraph. Thank god I'm a fast reader, because some of those answers are triiicky. For a bunch of them, the selection is more of a "pick the least objectionable answer" rather than "pick the best answer." I did have time enough to reread the entire section over again, but still. Compared to the GRE (which I've also taken and gotten in the top 8 percentile in verbal), this is kinda tricky. Not to scare anyone--it's not hard, it's just tricky.
Second. The supplemental test. At first I thought it was the BI, but when the instructions came ("This is a math knowledge test.") I thought to myself "home free!" since I consider myself to be pretty good at math. "Can I have some scratch paper?" I asked. "No, the instructions don't have that in them, so, no." "Can I write in the book and then erase it?" "Definitely not."
O...K...
So the moral of the story is: be prepared to do all the problems you did in the first math section in your head. In fact, there were some harder questions whose answers weren't even integer answers. E.g. pipe #1 fills a bucket in 43.64 seconds, pipe #2 fills the same bucket in 57.92 seconds; in 4 minutes and 27.41 seconds, how many more buckets does pipe #1 fill than pipe #2? It's not too bad if you're really good at ballparking/estimating.
Also the ANT section has stuff you might not ever know unless you've either gotten your PPL (and possibly not even then), or studied the FAA handbook to death (it's 400 pages, but chock full of all the info you need, and also online).
Overall, not terrible, but I missed two mech questions and forgot to guess.
Afterwards, talking with some of the ensigns/LJGs, I found out that only about 15 out of 200 of the naval acad SNAs got jets. And only 1 in 100 marine SNAs from the naval acad got jets. 1. Damn.
Took the (paper) ASTB on Wednesday (don't know how I did yet). Would have posted what I thought earlier, except that airwarriors went down. First off, thanks to everyone posting their guides/gouge (still unclear as to the meaning of "gouge"); as a lot of people have said: you all deserve a beer. No, four.
But. There's a new ASTB. It's not covered entirely by the ARCO book. Things still covered by the ARCO book are: math section, mechanical comp, ANT, and spatial apperception. Not covered: reading comprehension and the...supplemental test (!!).
Firstly, the reading comp is exactly that. No more, no less. No sentance completion, no "find the wrong word and replace with right word," no general word knowledge. Only paragraphs, where your task is to select the most right answer about the paragraph. Thank god I'm a fast reader, because some of those answers are triiicky. For a bunch of them, the selection is more of a "pick the least objectionable answer" rather than "pick the best answer." I did have time enough to reread the entire section over again, but still. Compared to the GRE (which I've also taken and gotten in the top 8 percentile in verbal), this is kinda tricky. Not to scare anyone--it's not hard, it's just tricky.
Second. The supplemental test. At first I thought it was the BI, but when the instructions came ("This is a math knowledge test.") I thought to myself "home free!" since I consider myself to be pretty good at math. "Can I have some scratch paper?" I asked. "No, the instructions don't have that in them, so, no." "Can I write in the book and then erase it?" "Definitely not."
O...K...
So the moral of the story is: be prepared to do all the problems you did in the first math section in your head. In fact, there were some harder questions whose answers weren't even integer answers. E.g. pipe #1 fills a bucket in 43.64 seconds, pipe #2 fills the same bucket in 57.92 seconds; in 4 minutes and 27.41 seconds, how many more buckets does pipe #1 fill than pipe #2? It's not too bad if you're really good at ballparking/estimating.
Also the ANT section has stuff you might not ever know unless you've either gotten your PPL (and possibly not even then), or studied the FAA handbook to death (it's 400 pages, but chock full of all the info you need, and also online).
Overall, not terrible, but I missed two mech questions and forgot to guess.
Afterwards, talking with some of the ensigns/LJGs, I found out that only about 15 out of 200 of the naval acad SNAs got jets. And only 1 in 100 marine SNAs from the naval acad got jets. 1. Damn.
