I put in a huge amount of effort revising and making sure I knew my stuff at stage 1...was more relieved to know that a lot of it was indeed not required for stage 1 and that I knew the answers to the 'easy' motivation paper rather than feeling it was a waste of time.
It may come easy to you reading material and knowing it all after having read it only once or twice. This in itself will be a bonus for you as if/when you get into college you will have to learn the MATS 1/2 verbatim...there are tests to make sure you know it verbatim...probably something you'll excell at no doubt. However there are people out there who, like you say, put in a lot of time and effort and are highly motivated in order to become an ATCO, but some of these people won't necessarily learn like you do. If they don't learn like you do they would have to spend a lot more time learning the information they were given and probably have to put in a bit more effort than you did, hence why NATS cover it all and say 'learn it all'. If they said 'read the info a couple of times over, don't bother learning it all because you won't actually need all this for your stage 1 tests' then why bother sending it out?! Besides which, you will need to know the information later on and I'm not just talking later recruitment stages.
As for tests that weren't/were included in your stage 1....things change....you'll find that a lot as the recruitment process goes on so all I can say to that is be prepared. Aren't ATCOs expected to be able to adapt to change? I think you'll find that one of the key personality traits of an ATCO is the necessity to be able to deal with unforseen situations and circumstances...it makes no difference how much or how little you have prepared/revised.
Furthermore, you will be given an online personality questionnaire to do...it's just not at the psychometric testing stage.
Be careful who you make comments to on here, (in particular...ATCKnob as you kindly put it)...he's a lot further on than you...in fact, he could one day end up being your superior. Not doing yourself any favours. Also, try not to slate the company you are so desperate to work for...if you really think they're doing a bad job of it, why not tell them? I'm sure they'll appreciate the feedback rather than just seeing it posted on here.
We all like to give eachother a hand and advice...some of us just read the posts, others get involved more than the next person...I hope you find what you need on here and I wish you good luck with your selection process
