I did the full day of testing in Melbourne in December. Here's a run down of what we did. All tests are done at a computer screen. I can't say this will be exactly how it will run for you in Sydney, but I can't see a reason why it wouldn't be, either. As someone said, you can't prepare for most - except for brushing up on time = distance * speed formulae. Get sleep before hand, relax when you get a chance between tests.
Apart from the first test, we got 5-6 chances at practicing the tasks so it was perfectly clear what the test was. The results of each of the tests was made available within an hour of finishing. You had to get over the pass mark in every one of the tests to be successful. The tests took a lot of focus.
They are trying to determine whether you can process information from numerous souces simultaneously, speed and accuracy of your work, how well you can determine whether information is useful or not, amongst other things.
The Numerical Reasoning Test was 60 multiple choice questions to be completed in 40 minutes. They were all questions about speed, distance and time and they got harder towards the end of the test. Using aircraft speed, so the km/h numbers were quite large.
While were doing this test, there was another test running simultaneously. This was the Interrupt Test. A cassette tape was playing in the background the entire time and every now and then a voice would say "Pens Down - Listen". Then it would say a set of instructions for us to complete on a separate answer sheet in front of us. There were 25 questions and the question sheet included various sets of patterns, numbers, letters, shapes, etc. The instructions got more complicated as time went on. They were not repeated so you had to get them right first time.
An easy example - "Put a circle in the 2nd box from the left and a cross in the last box"
A hard exampe - "Circle all the vowels in the list that follow a consonant, but if that consonant is W or J then underline the consonant following the vowel."
Obviously designed to see how well we coped when interrupted.
Next - the SORT Test. Two shapes would appear side-by-side on the screen for about 2-3 seconds. If they were identical we pressed the F2 key on the keyboard. If they weren't, then we had to sort the left pattern depending on certain categories. There were about 9 phases of this test. And they rotated between having to sort by colour (Red / Green / Blue), by shape (Square / Circle / Triangle / Diamond) or by number (0-250 / 251-500, etc)
Apart from the speed of the test, it was complicated by presenting over-riding rules that were presented at the top of the screen. These rules varied from "Sort all green triangles as blue shapes" to "If the digits add up to more than 10, then pretend the number is 555". Sorting by colour and shape wasn't terribly difficult, but everyone had a lot of trouble with the number sorting. Given the short space of time they flashed on the screen, it was incredibly had to read the number (which was in smallish print), add up the digits, remember where the cutoff points for the sorting categories were, etc.
The rules sometimes would be vaild for a number of turns, sometimes for 1 turn, and sometimes none at all.
It was testing for reaction speed as well as accuracy.
The 3rd test was another 2-in-1 test.
There was a line on the right-side of the screen and a small square on the left. The square would move towards the line at various speeds each time. About halfway along the screen, the square would disappear and we had to press a button when we thought it had reached the line. That was the Time Estimation part. Scores were based on how far before or after the line we got the square.
To complicate matters was the Pattern Recognition Test. While the square was invisible and moving towards the line, up would appear 2 patterns we had to identify as either "Same" or "Different". Again, the score was based on speed and accuracy. It was like comparing the dots on two dice, except that instead of a square they were in a blue circle and instead of 6 dots, there were 13 positions the dots could be in. Not easy to do quickly when you're trying to remember how quickly the square was moving in the background, but I managed OK there.
The last test was some Practice ATC. We were given a simple square are of airspace and we had to guide planes around to their correct destinations safely and with minimal delay. The were 2 air strips we had to land planes on and 4 small gates we had to fly planes out of (N, S, E, W). As each plane appeared on the radar, we had to click on it to recognise it was there, and then guide it through one of the gates or to an airstrip depending on it's destination. We had to make sure they were at the right speeds, direction and altitude. This was over a period of about 20 minutes. At most there were about 12 planes on the screen at once. It's really just a computer game.