Hi lemony and Killua.
Your opinion is very interesting but I don't agree with you at all.
My point of view is that people are more or less trained to do this kind of exercises depending of his own experience in life.
When you say, for example, that you have good skills... good skills compared with what?, There may be people out there with good skills that, maybe, have never played a videogame (for example) and that could be a BIG problem, you know?
Your time responses, your ability to move the mouse's cursor, ... and other many things are directly related to what you have made along your entire life, and that does nothing to do with your ability to be a good or bad ATC. It's just a matter of practice.
In my case, I think I have good skills, and I have always been very good at videogames either, so, in some way, even if I hadn't practice with this software, probably I would have practice (without knowing) more than others in the past.
So, it's not memorizing the results, becouse you don't really pass if you are not up to it, even if you practice. The thing is that you can, in some way, assure that you are not going to make many mistakes due to your nervous or whatever (you know what you are facing to and you can focus in the tests). The software itself doesn't make your more clever, but it helps you to keep a higher level of success in YOUR highest level (and that, again, could be not enouth to fulfill the NATS criteria).
Anyway, this is just my point of view and I respect yours, and by the way, I earn nothing with that software because I'm not involved in their development... haha so I don't mind wether it seems to you it is wonderful or a ****.
Thanks for your comments. They are always welcome.
For those that are wondering about the kind of tests you are facing in Stage 2, I will summarize a bit what I met there:
- Listening
An exercise with different parts where a person speaks in english and you have to select within a multiple choices answers. For natives it is (I think) quite easy. Not so for foreigners. The most difficult part of this exercise was (from my point of view) when the voice says some differents numbers, quite long, and you have to remember and select the correct one (the possibilities are very similar, so pay attention).
- Cubes
Again, 3D cubes like the ones in Stage 1, but in the computer. You have to choose the correct representation of the cube that match with the draw given.
- Planning Ability
You are presented a kind of map, with poitns representing airports, runways, aircrafts, and you are given some instructions. You have to follow the rules and answer something. For example "what aircraft lands first?" and things like that.
- Relative direction
You are presented an arrow and a ball. Then, below, ther is a word, saying "Right" or "Left". If the ball is at the right of the arrow and the word says right, that's correct, so you have to click on "YES", if not, you have to click on "NO". The ball and arrow are changing of position and heading all the time. The main problem here is the time response. You have 1 second or so to click YES or NO. I think this is the easier of all... but... again, it's my point of view.
There is a second part of this test. If the arrow is (I think is was) white, then you have to interpret all in the opposite way (I mean, an arrow with a ball at right and the word "RIGHT" beneath would be "NO", and with the word "LEFT" would be "YES").
- Learning and applying rules
You find different shapes (circles, squares, triangles...) and in the bottom of the screen you have different possibilities and you have to sort them due to some rules (by color, by shape... ). It changes very quickly and you have to pay attention to some special rules that appears in the top of the screen like:
sort this as a square, sort all green triangles as circles...
and things like that.
It also appears numbers, and you have to sort them due to other rules, like:
sort 134-200 blue numbers as 350-500, sort numbers with 5 number as 0-58...
The rules just apply while they are presented in the screen (I mean, you don't have to memorize them).
- Collission avoidance
This is one of the most difficult (If not the most). In the screen you can see different numbers representing aircrafts. Each one is moving in one direction and you have to calculate if their heading are in conflict due to the position and speed. If you think that anyone is, you have to remove it using the number keypad (just push the number of the aircraft and it is removed). The problem is that in the bottom of the screen, at the same time, appears a lot of mathematical calculations, quite difficult some of them, and you have no time to think of them, because the operation hides after 1 second or so. As the time pass by, more and more aircrafts are presented in the screen and the operations hides quicker. To answer the questions, you have to choose within 4 different possibilities (push A,B,C or D) in the special keyboard they give you.
- Strip management display
Very difficult too but it's very well explained in the exercise.
You are presented different flight strips and you have to sort them into the correct checkpoint, remove the old ones, update flight levels and arrive time...
Check for local and opposites conflicts... just a mess !!
Some of them are done twice (one in a browser connected to Eurocontrol webpage) with the mouse, and again with a special keyboard in a local program of NATS. If my memory doesn't fail to me, we did twice "relative direction", "learning and applying rules".
I may forget anything. Just ask.
See you and good luck !!