Just took it yesterday with a score of 67 9/9/8
Some of my thoughts:
Math: To study for this I took all the practice tests I could like Barrons and the ones you can find here. I also used this website
ixl.com. Its a K-12 practice problem website that spits out random math problems, and it covers all kinds of subjects. It cost like 15 bucks a month but it really helped. I just did most of the Algebra I and Geometry problems.
After the first two questions which I'm pretty sure I got right, the difficulty ramped up a lot. Most of the questions I got were probability, logarithms, and the problems where you have a group of people who can accomplish a job in a set amount of hours.
One I remember specifically went like:
3 guys can do a job in 12 hours. If those same guys work for 4 hours, and then a new guy joins every hour after that how fast can they finish the job. Answers were 8hrs, 7hrs 20 min, 7 hrs, and 6hrs 20min.
Or something like that, I just guessed on it. Just take your time on the test because you have 40 minutes and I'm sure accuracy is more important than speed.
I really wish I studied probability and those worker questions more
Reading: The questions I got were usually pretty hard and tedious to read. I got a few easy ones though because I was getting some wrong. I didn't get any of the vocabulary questions that the Barron tests had. Not much else to say, easily my least favorite part of the test.
Mechanical: I have a mechanical engineering degree so this wasn't too bad for me. Lots of pulley questions, Bernoulli questions and string tension. All I did to prepare was go over the Barron's section and read the gouges.
One question I remember gave me a picture that looked like the symbol for an inductor or coil and the answer choices were capacitor choke, resistor choke or some other kind of choke. I just picked the third option because it didn't look like a resistor or capacitor.
Personality Test: I got 100 sets of 2 question choices, most of which will both make you look bad. I just went with the opposite personality of someone who is prone to accidents from Chapter 2 of the FAA handbook.
Five traits were discovered in pilots prone to having accidents. These pilots:
• Have disdain toward rules
• Have very high correlation between accidents on their flying records and safety violations on their driving records
• Frequently fall into the “thrill and adventure seeking” personality category
• Are impulsive rather than methodical and disciplined, both in their information gathering and in the speed and selection of actions to be taken
• Have a disregard for or tend to under utilize outside sources of information, including copilots, flight attendants, flight service personnel, flight instructors, and ATC
Aviation Knowledge: This one was easier than I was expecting. Didn't get really any questions about airport operations or airspaces like I expected. Some that I remember were that the P51 Mustang escorted bombers, and the Me 262 (not the F86 Sabre) was the worlds first jet fighter that flew combat operations. I read the entire FAA hanbook and there were some really good chapters but a lot goes into more detail than you might need. I attached a table of contents that someone else highlighted of the important stuff.
Performance Based Maneuvers: I felt like a did really bad on the UAV portion. Most of the time my time to pick was around 3-5 seconds and I think I picked the wrong parking lot like 5 or 6 times. If you're doing the UAV flash cards, the ones were you see your cardinal direction on the map are the ones that are on the test.
For the joystick part, I prepared by buying a flightstick and playing fps games with the Y-axis inverted on my computer. I used a program called JoytoKey to convert the joystick movement to mouse movement, that way I could play most games with it. Mostly I played Killing Floor 2 (which is a really fun game) and went for headshots. On the emergency scenario section, I got the three emergencies and did them all pretty quickly. There was a knob on the top and bottom of the throttle that you manipulated with your thumb and forefinger and then a button you push with your thumb. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to tell if the knob was 100% or 0% but there is an indicator on the screen showing you their status. If you're curious, the HOTAS setup my recruiter had was the Logitech x52.
Final thoughts: All in all, I think I did about 3-4 weeks of actual studying and I'm pretty happy with my score. I felt like was doing pretty badly the whole time, especially on the PBM part so I was pretty surprised at the end.