I was talking to a mate about the skills test earlier today and I thought I'd add a couple of points that will hopefully put some minds to ease.
Its important to note with the skills test that it's any two applicants may not get exactly the same questions. The system is designed to interpret your answers and the next question may be tailored accordingly.
EG: The questions are time limited. The correct answer to Question 1 may be 23.5 but you'll be presented with answers ranging from 18-29 in 0.1 increments. You may not have enough time to get the exactly correct answer and instead ball park one close to the mark. Depending on how close you get to the correct answer on Q1 may have an impact on what your Question 2 may be. Pick 18.2 and your next question may well be easier than someone who picked 23.1. The question that second person gets may well be easier than someone who got the correct answer at 23.5.
Even if the follow up questions end up being the same, the reality is that given you'll have to 'ball park' some answers, even this gives them an indication as to how good your skills are.
The intent as I understand it is for the test to be highly discriminatory. Rather than have 100 pilots of whom all may pass a 'benchmark' assessment but it's difficult to differentiate between 10-20 of them as they all got all the questions correct, this test is designed to try and rate between each individual applicant. The end result is a list from 1-100 of the capabilities of each individual candidate. Maybe as Open Descent has pointed out the intent is to find the real geniuses and tell them they're way too smart to be pilots!
No pilot I've spoken to thought they had done particularly well across any of the verbal, numerical or logical reasoning tests. Despite this, some of the comments made by the HR people indicate that they were amazed at how strong some of the results were from the 120 of us that did it as part of the application process for pilot assessors. 'Rocket scientists' and 'maths whizzes' were the two phrases I recall hearing being applied to everyone across the board. Apparently it even attracted some comment back to Qantas from the people who developed the tests. I don't consider myself any smarter than the average QF driver.
So yeah, it's a dog. It's a means to an end and despite my dislike of how I felt after doing it, every applicant joining Qantas now has been through it so it's obviously delivering the info they need. I'm sure that makes some unhappy- perhaps Mohikan because he or she tends to only post when unhappy (normally projecting their unhappiness towards me but having added them to my ignore list I can't tell for sure)- but it is what it is and it's been approved by the Chief Pilot as the system they're using.
boeinginthewest, I don't know is the honest answer. I'd be surprised if they even knew who was going through the process back in 2008.