Chapter 20

Ten Things to Do Before You Take the Test

In This Chapter

Thinking about your service branch preferences

Maximizing your study time

Adjusting your schedule for studying and test day

Gearing up for any endeavor involves all sorts of planning, and the military flight aptitude test is no different. In this chapter, we distill the most important activities to tackle before you sit down for the test, including prioritizing your preferred service branches, making and following a study schedule, and staying relaxed in the day or two before exam time.

Determine Which Service You Want to Fly For

Before you take a flight aptitude test, spend some time thinking seriously about what you want to fly and for whom. At the same time, be realistic about any physical or age limitations you may have. Do you wear corrective lenses? Are you too old for the Air Force program but young enough for the Army? Is your eventual goal to fly on a carrier? You must ask yourself all these questions and more to get a practical handle on which test to focus on. When coauthor Terry was young, he wanted to fly for the Navy. But he realized that his corrective lenses were a no-go in the Navy, so he set his sights (no pun intended) on the Army aviation program.

Attack Your Weak Areas

If you already fly, you know the importance of preflight planning. You’d never make a long cross-country flight without having a plan for adverse weather, fuel stops, and where the good places to eat are. The same holds true for taking your military flight aptitude test (except maybe for mapping out the food stops). You need to make a plan based on where you perceive your skills are, where they need to be, and how long you have to get them there.

The following sections help you spot the chinks in your armor and set up a solid plan to fill them in.

Identifying your weaknesses

You may be unsure where your weak areas lie (or worry that you’re too weak in all areas), so the best way to assess where you are and how far you need to go is to take the practice tests in Part IV. After you score the tests, make three columns on a sheet of paper and, for each section, group the answers you got right because you knew them, the ones you got right by guessing, and the ones you got wrong. Apply half of the correct guesses to the knew-it column and half to the incorrect column and look at the distribution. On test day, you’re worried only about the overall score (whether that’s from guessing or remembering), but at this stage you’re more concerned with how much concrete knowledge you have; we recommend dividing your correct guesses this way as a (somewhat arbitrary) method for separating your knowledge from guessing luck. Analyzing your preliminary results this way gives you a pretty clear idea of where you stand in each area of the test. (Don’t worry about skewing your later results by taking the practice tests this early in the game; when you retake them after weeks of studying, you’ll have either forgotten the questions or seared them into your memory, which can be a valuable weapon in your flight aptitude testing arsenal.)

Getting started

When you see what your problem subjects are, think about your history with those topics. Are your science scores low because you haven’t cracked a biology or chemistry textbook since your freshman year of high school? Build your study plan to incorporate more science into your new routine. If you get stuck on vocab and reading comprehension, spend most of your time focusing your study efforts on those topics. (Flip to Parts II and III for help reviewing various test subjects.) And if your academic knowledge seems to be in order but you lack flying experience, go fly somewhere (and we don’t mean take a vacation to the Keys). We discuss the benefits of pre-test flight lessons in the later section “Take Flying Lessons or Remain Current” and in Chapter 11. Resist the (all-too-human) urge to focus on the subjects you’re good at.

Making plans

What gets planned gets done. The military loves plans. A small operation of only minutes at the target is the result of hours and maybe even days and weeks of actual planning. Now, we aren’t saying that you should spend weeks making up a study plan, but you should set a strategy to accomplish the study goals you identify. Tailor the plan to fit your needs. We discuss study schedules in more detail in Chapter 4.

Finding the time

Finding time to study for the aptitude test is a matter of examining your priorities. If you work full time, you may have to sacrifice your social life to give proper attention to your test prep. Busy finishing up school and just don’t have the extra time to study for this test on top of finals? Maybe you need to plan on taking the test a few months after school is out so you have time to devote to all your exams.

Stick to the Plan

“Stick to the plan.” sounds like a simple statement, but so does “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” After you have a plan (see the preceding section), look at it as though you’re on a determined diet; you have to put in the work to get the results you want. At the same time, don’t beat yourself up if you stumble occasionally. Maybe your plan is to set aside two hours a day to do nothing but practice for the exam, but then you go out for a quick lunch and end up being gone all day. Don’t give up completely; just start fresh the next day and get back on track. One or two missed days here or there won’t hurt you; the problem starts when one or two days turn into three or four and then six, seven, or eight days.

Motivation is key. Set up a reward system and take an occasional night off. Terry spent six days a week studying; if (and only if) he made his goals in those six days, he’d go out on Friday night. Another great motivational boost is to keep a picture of the aircraft you want to fly posted near your desk. (Interestingly, the picture Terry used ended up being one of the few Army aircraft he never flew.)

Take Flying Lessons or Remain Current

The best way to maximize your score on the aerodynamics and spatial orientation sections of the test is getting some actual “stick-and-rudder” time. The best course of action is to obtain your pilot’s license before you take the exam. Doing so shows the selection board that you’re a dedicated and serious pilot candidate and vastly improves your flight scores (as it did for Terry). However, even a couple of hours of lessons can give you an edge. Head to Chapter 11 for more on taking flying lessons, including some sample lesson plans to maximize your instruction time.

The Air Force actually gives you a higher selection point value — up to 200 flight hours — for previous flight experience.

Boost Your Vocabulary and Read

Although we recommend studying formal language topics such as analogy relationships and reading comprehension as part of your study plan, one of the best ways to keep your language skills fresh is to read whatever you can get your hands on — light novels, old textbooks, anything. Focus on comprehending what you’ve read, and remember to keep a list of words that you don’t know so that you can look them up later.

Study, and we mean study, prefixes, suffixes, and roots. If you become close friends with these subjects, the vocabulary test will be a breeze. Chapter 5 provides lists of common word parts to give you a head start on this preparation.

Refresh Your Mathematical and Science Skills

On the science front, you need to know basic biology, chemistry, and physics; important math topics include trigonometry, algebra, and geometry. Keep in mind that the tests don’t focus on calculus, so don’t review that. Finally, work with the mathematical order of operations (parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction) until it becomes second nature. Chapters 7 through 10 help you review and practice your math and science skills.

If time allows, consider taking refresher courses in the math and science subjects that appear on the test, or at least those you feel weak in. Terry took his first test — the Navy flight aptitude test — in August, and in preparation, he audited both Biology II and Physics I (without doing the labs) in the spring semester because he hadn’t taken those subjects in four years.

Memorize Basic Mathematical and Scientific Formulas and Laws

The last thing you want to be doing during the test is fumbling for basic formulas and scientific laws. To give yourself an edge, commit to memory the main formulas you need to know, including the following. You can find many of them in the review chapters in Parts II and III.

Area: Square, rectangular, circle, triangle

Perimeter: Square, rectangle, circle, triangle

Volume: Cube, cylinder, rectangular box

Distance conversion

Temperature conversion

Physics: Power, force, velocity, acceleration, electrical, and wavelengths

Chemistry: Acid-base relationships and common bonding

Use Training Aids

Flashcards, computer programs, word games, and other training aids can all help you perform better on the test and make your studying entertaining. Flashcards are especially good for vocabulary building; Terry found that using them first thing in the morning and last thing at night worked well for him. Chapter 5 gives you the lowdown on using vocabulary flashcards. If you don’t have a lot of flying experience, consider trying a flight simulator (just don’t get sucked in and spend hours and hours on it).

Take Practice Exams

As part of your preparation for the real-life test, you should sit down and take each practice exam in Part IV just like you were sitting for the actual service branch test. One exception: If you have to exceed the time requirements to complete a section, go ahead and do it; at this point, answering all the questions is more important than adhering to the strict time limit. Just realize that you’re doing so and keep track of how far you go over; you’ll want to work on your time management before the real deal. Complete one test at a time, and don’t take the next test until you’ve shored up any weak spots you identify with the most recent test. Take the exams in the exact same order you plan to take the official versions. After you finish a test, check your answers and follow up on missed questions to reinforce the knowledge. Revisit missed questions the next day to see whether your review paid off.

Take your formal practice tests in an unfamiliar setting, or at least somewhere different from where you study. If you study at home, take your practice test at the library. If you study at the library, go to a different section of the library. Subconsciously, this change of scenery helps you formally process the test as a real-world event and not just another study effort.

Get Plenty of Rest Prior to the Exam

As hard as getting to sleep the night before the test may be, a restful night really does pay off on test day. Figure out what time you need to get up and start adjusting your sleep schedule around that time for at least two weeks prior to the exam. The night before the test — real or practice — do something relaxing like going out for dinner and a movie and then go to bed early. (Depressants and stimulants may hamper your sleep plan, though, so you may want to lay off the booze at dinner and the sugary candy at the theater.) Chapter 4 deals with prepping for test day in more detail.