Hello everyone. After having sat through FEAST1 one week ago, I can't entirely agree you can't prepare for the test. Of course, having the skills is a vital part of everything, but simple preparations will give you an edge over people with similar capabilities.
It is useful to know the compass rose and associated headings. Easily lands you 5 extra minutes breathing time when everybody else is scratching their head understanding it.
Speed/distance/time calculations are useless. You can easily guesstimate everything. This assumes you have good spacial representation skills, which you should, anyway.
Folding the cube, try googling different patterns, print them, cut out, then play with them. Fold towards you, and away from you, and every other possible way. Then put the paper down and recreate this in your head.
Take a deck of cards and have a friend show them to you in fast succession, series of say 20 at a time. Take turns at recognizing either the face value or the colour asap. Introduce arbitrary rule bending. Such as considering all aces are fives etc.
Have somebody read out random numbers in fast succession. Decide on odd or even asap.
Listen to boring news or stories about 1 to 3 minutes long, then have a friend ask you questions regarding them. Not obvious ones, of course.
Listen to news stories quoting figures, memorize them and reproduce them. Or have somebody write them down along with similar figures and have you pick out the right one.
Do anything else you can think of involving elevated English. Verbal is best, written is better than nothing.
Take a good night's sleep and walk in there confident you'll do ok. Even if you won't, it won't make a fool out of you. It's just like being not that great on a computer game. Plus everybody will be so worried about their own exam they won't notice you.
Having said that, apart from taking the first exercise in FEAST1 too slowly and not finishing all the questions because the instructors were constantly reminding us not to rush it, I think I did ok. Missed matching some of the numbers in that part of the test, but generally walked away with a good feeling about this.
The whole thing felt less like a test but more like a children's video game at a different pace. It was somehow fun, I could say captivating.
Walked away after 3 hours thinking it should have lasted a bit longer. I wasn't done for the day. Managed to drive 200 miles home straight after that and still feel fresh.
Too bad it's another 2 weeks before I find out how I did, and if I make it to part FEAST2. I'm itching to continue, though a bit bummed that I missed some, knowing that we're close to 400 people competing for those 15 spots. Time will tell, I guess.