Hey guys,
Just wanted to say a quick thankyou to everyone who's posted, I had my stage 1 this afternoon and I found this thread really helpful during preperation.
As I've now been through stage one I figured I'd do my bit and answer a few questions, so here's a quick description of the tests I had today:
There's quite a long personality questionaire (about 100 questions) to do as soon as you get there, I figure the best you can do is answer this honestly - its not a test and I don't think there are right or wrong answers. After this the tests begin. All the tests were multiple choice.
The first test was the ATC motivation test, based upon the 30 pages of info they email you before you book the test. They gave us 18 mins to finish this (think it was about 20 - 30 questions) which I found was plenty. I didn't find this particularly hard, though there were one or two answers I wasn't sure about... as long as you've read the stuff they send you through thuroughly several times you shouldn't find it too hard. There were only a couple of questions on the aircraft info in the back, if you have a general idea of the kind of destinations the most common aircraft can fly to and at what kind of speed you would have done ok on the test I sat today... but who knows what they might choose to ask on any given day, I've no idea if everybody sits the same paper or not, so if it were me I'd still suggest memorising as much detail as possible anyway.
The next test was the spatial reasoning test (the infamous cubes). For this we had 20 mins to answer 40 questions. They are exactly like the example questions NATS send out in the emails you get before the test, but they do get quite a bit harder (the patterns get a bit more complicated and the 2D frame is a much harder layout in the later questions). I think the hardest thing about these is the time, I managed (just) to get it all finished, but the fact that you are being pushed for time makes it tougher than it would be at a more leisurely pace. At 40 questions in 20 mins thats one every 30 seconds, so bare that in mind when preparing.
The next test was the diagramming test. Again this was very similar to the example they email you before hand. Some of them got a bit long and you have to juggle a whole load of operations and symbols around in your head at once to work out the answer. They did give us scrap paper for rough working in this one, but again the time limit is the trickiest bit and I think if you have to start scribbling you'd likely not finish it all. You have 50 questions in 20 mins. I managed to finish 49 of them.
The final paper is the arithmatic test. This is all distance speed time questions. Most were very straight forward mental arithmatic. I had to use the scrap paper to calculate a couple of the harder ones. Yet again, none of the questions were terribly difficult in and of themselves, but the time limit means you have to work quite fast and there is little time to check your answers. I think this one was 25 questions in 15 minutes. I finished but had no time to check my answers.
Hope this is helpful, if anyone has any questions I'd be happy to help. If anyone else was there today I hope it went well for you, good luck.