Common format aptitude testing [Archive]

Wee Weasley Welshman

1st Dec 1999, 01:23

See below re-post of a thread I did ages ago concerning this subject, Not all relevant but the arguements are still sound. Keep your chin up - I've passed every aptitude test for pilots in the UK (virtually) and although I was able to pass my IR first time with only 17.9 hrs twin time CABAIR still told me I didn;t have the aptitude for being a pilot on the Air2Bob scheme. Makes me laugh now but it annoyed me at the time. Best of luck - next time.

WWW

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Well there seems to be rather a lot of people interested in Aptitude testing on these pages at the moment. As it comes up fairly often I thought I might bang out a little essay on the subject in another of the occasional series of WWW infomercials. Sorry to all those who have heard this before from me in other threads.

So Aptitude testing. What does this vertically challenged Celtic fellow know about it you may well ask. Well I’ve been through (and passed) the aptitude tests for the RAF, British Airways, British Midland, CABAIR, Air Atlantique and last but not least Aer Lingus. Some I have done more than once. In my last job I worked as a Recruitment Officer for an electronics company and ran selection centres and interviews for Graduate and Modern Apprentice training programmes and I must have hired about 50 odd people between the ages of 16 and 25 in my time. I also did a Psychology degree at one of the better universities and tailored most of my study to my interest in aviation and selection procedures. As part of my studies I worked on personality testing, psychometric measurement, Crew Resource Management and ultimately a final year dissertation entitled “Comparative Psychometric Testing in Aviation Selection Procedures”. For this I (only because it was v.interestig to me you understand) got a First. I was also lucky enough to be granted Academic access to the MICROPAT research conducted by Prof Bartram of Hull University (yes the ones used by BA, RAF and others). In the light of this it might be fair to say I know a but about the aims, procedures, validity and strategy behind the tests that you guys are going to be sitting. However, and it is a big however, this does not mean I ‘know the answers’ or can help you skew the results. Its impossible because, as I shall explain, the tests have been devised in just such a manner as to avoid this.

So, what are the tests all about I hear you ask (I hate weak links like that). Well the tests split into two groups. The first if personality assessment and the second is aptitude testing – or to be more exact ability testing. Lets deal with personality assessment first. You take a couple of thousand people and get them to fill out a questionnaire detailing their preferences, likes, dislikes, opinions, philosophies etc. You then get a group of peers and associates to ‘rate’ these same people on scales such as aggressiveness, loyalty, maturity, emotionality etc. You put all the questionnaire answers and then the peer/associate ratings into a big computer and let the software link peoples question answers with the ratings given by their peers. After a couple of thousand assessments you get a trend established. When you yourself fill in the 300 odd questions at your assessment day what you are doing is providing a shortcut way for the assessors to, in effect, ask your particular peers and associates lots of searching questions about you and rating you on various scales. The process works on the basis that if you answer questions 1 through to 57 in (largely) the same way that a couple of thousand other people who, were considered highly socially competitive, answered question 1 through to 57 then in all probability if you were rated by your peers/associates they would also say that you were socially competitive. As far as personality psychologists are concerned the only measure of whether you are socially competitive or not is whether the people who know you say that you are or not (follow that?). The problem arises when you get people who are the life and soul of the party and appear funny and confident but are in fact lonely miserable tormented souls who just put on an act. These people screw up the whole concept but this is largely ignored as far as personality assessment is concerned.

So what can you do to make sure you answer the personality assessment ‘well’. This is rather difficult. You might be tempted into answering not as yourself but in a manner which you believe will be consistent with an airline pilot. Very dangerous thing to do this. Firstly there are ‘lie questions’ embedded in the questionnaire. These generally take the form of subtlety different questions that get at the same thing that are spaced widely apart in the test. If you answer Yes to ‘I love reading books’ but later say Yes to ‘I prefer to watch an interesting TV documentary on world politics than read a book’ your ‘Lie’ scale score will increase as the two answers are non-analogous. There will be many (and more subtle) such traps in the test paper. Now your Lie scale score will never be zero but if it is too high you might ‘fail’ the test and the higher it gets the more it reinforces other undesirable scales that you do not want high scores on. The moral therefore is to be yourself as doing so generally should lead you not to inadvertently contradict yourself and increase your lie score. Another problem is that your particular results are ‘weighted’ according to your age and sex and sometimes social background. This means that you might be able to do a perfect impression of a ‘typical’ Airline Pilot when it comes to answering the paper. Perhaps you know some already or your Father is an airline pilot and you know well his views and preferences etc. If you adopt this persona when answering the paper you might think that you are answering in the perfect way for the job you seek. This may well not be the case. The average airline pilot whom you base your judgement on will probably be older and more mature. The weightings that apply to you will not be the same as those that apply to him, or indeed, her. By adopting their persona you might well skew your scores in a very strange fashion. It could be like a young tearaway answering in the style of his granny by the time the weightings have been applied. This is liable to result in a rather ‘odd’ profile with you seeming to be an unusual young person. This is not what you want to be doing at all. If you hate Newspapers and Current Affairs then as a 19 year old that is probably not an extraordinary thing. The fact that most Chief Pilots like nothing better than a night in with a Broadsheet and an episode of The Money Programme does not mean you should profess to liking the same. Get the picture? Good.

Another problem is that different organisations are seeking different results from what could be the same test. For example, the RAF want hyper confident bullish young chaps that will fly into a night sky full of tracer with the absolute knowledge that they will not be hit because – hey ‘I’m me and I’m God – OK?’ Now this attitude, whilst necessary and understandable for the armed forces might well be different to the one that, say, British Airways seek. They might well be looking for the type of chap that likes to play by the rules, err on the side of caution and would rather put his feet up with a nice cup of cocoa and read the latest sheaf of SOP’s than charge stark naked at Jerry thank-you-very-much. The two organisations, quite rightly, have defined a different ideal profile for their needs. If you don’t know the profile then you cannot even attempt at adopting the relevant persona. Obviously I exaggerate for illustration here but you might be surprised by the degree of tinkering different employers make in test-pass profiling. The RAF for example were very very close at one time to weighting favourably applicants who had penalty points on their driving licenses because they found a lot of their successful pilots had at least three points at any one time. It’s a valid indicator as someone actually proved but politics got in the way. But, I doubt if the 405 passengers on tonight’s BA 747 to JFK would think it a good idea that young George up front was teetering on the edge of another speeding ban do you?!? Point made I hope.

So all of this might be leaving you a little forlorn. Well there are some practical things you can do when confronted by personality tests. The first thing to bear in mind is that most people pass them. Often they are not Pass/Fail test but are often used later on should you reach the next stage to direct particular lines of questioning. You should definitely try to be yourself and not conform to some ideal you have in your mind. HOWEVER, it is my experience that the airline industry is looking for someone who is fairly middle of the road, likes people but is no party animal and has a sensibly mature outlook on life. To this end you want to make sure you answer in the style of someone who like parties but does not go out every night, has a close circle of friends but not a huge one or just one mate from Primary School etc etc. Generally the only people excluded are the people at the extremes of the bell curve – as long as you are not a hunch backed drooling loon living in a wattle and daub cottage near Saffron Walden with a penchant for collecting rare fungi you will probably be alright (apologies to all who fall into the aforementioned).

So, we move now onto aptitude tests. This is a bit of a misnomer. The tests actually measure an intelligence of a certain kind. Someone somewhere decides that such an intelligence is useful as a Pilot. Thus an ‘aptitude’ is born. Nowadays this is largely done via factor analysis. You take a big sample of successful pilots and test them at various things like sums, spelling, reaction times and so forth. You set their scores against the general population and where they score high (or indeed low) you say that this fluctuation is a component of FactorX. Now FactorX could be anything - but as long as a statistically significant proportion of the successful pilot population displays FactorX you can simply reclassify it as ‘Pilot Aptitude’. My own particular research in this field for example found that possessing a vocabulary above a certain threshold was a statistically significant indicator of success in Air Cadet pilot training. Honestly- the cadets who were rated highly for flying ability by their instructors on Air Training Corps gliding courses were the ones who had the highest scores on a Verbal Reasoning and Vocabulary test. The statistical significance of the data was very very high and thus I could confidently link a particular vocabulary test with likely success in flying training. Now what the link between the two actually is I have no idea. I can think of little logical reason and was hard put to come up with a plausible hypothesis. However, this is exactly the way that aptitude testing is constructed. You may see little relevance between what you are asked to do and your ability to fly but there will be some empirical evidence somewhere that underlies what you are asked to do. It has been my experience that candidates are often exasperated as being asked to join dots with pencils etc when they have gone solo in 1hr 4miutes and their great uncle is Chuck Yeager. Such healthy scepticism should not however cloud your judgement about aptitude testing as the mathematics behind it all are very robust and practically irrefutable.

What you can practically do to enhance your scores is somewhat limited but nevertheless worthwhile. Mathematical reasoning is probably the easiest short term improvement that you can make. Now please do not go overboard. The testers have to pitch at the median level and so they simply cannot ask questions about hard thing like quadratic equations (yes, settle down at the back – I’m sure you can do them standing on your head drinking a pint of Guinness whilst chatting up the head girl of the local Sixth Form College in French but us mere mortals cannot - OK?) Therefore they always go for the simple question but a tight time constraint. You will often get 30 questions in 10 minutes. Someone like myself who has passed most of them does about 21 before the final whistle (although he craftily guesses the last 9 as there is never any negative marking any more <big hint> ). Somebody at the tests always claims to have finished the whole lot but ignore them because they are strange people who wear corduroy and have never smoked a cigarette in their miserable little lives.

On a similar, vein and to digress a moment, please please please do not get phased by the annoying well tanned fellow who sidles up during lunch to explain how he is enjoying the whole day immmmmensley because his Father has flown Concorde for the last twenty years whilst he has got a Double First in AeroPhysics from Cambridge before spending the last 12 months teaching the Masai Mauia tribe to become self sufficient cash crop farmers in Western Somoa. You are just as good as him – DO NOT PANIC! If these people try to get in a p_ssing contest with you about how good they are then that generally means that they are crap. Be cool and invite the nice guys for a pint at the end of the day and you won’t go far wrong in my experience.

So back to the real issue. Make sure you know how many inches in a metre (2.54cm to an inch, 12 inch to the foot, 3.28 feet to the metre), pounds in a kilo (2.2), US gallons in a Imp gallon (1.2) etc. Then make sure you know about Pythagoras and basic angles, degrees, etc. It sometimes helps if you know degrees and minutes of Longitude and Latitude and where the equator might be found. Some concept of pulleys, gears and hydraulics if useful as is the ability to add up various areas given length and width. Be able square simple numbers and if you can understand Powers i.e. 3 times 10 to the power 5, then it helps. All of the above is to GCSE standard only. DO NOT go above that – there is no point. GCSE Maths, Geography and English are useful. If like me it has been more than 5 years since you studied these things then a simple book from WHSmith is well in order to get you back up to speed.

More elaborate tests will confront you with various puzzles and number sequences to solve. This is an area where prior experience really helps. A great little book for six quid is ‘Test our own IQ’ by H. Eyesenck (check spelling). Eyesenck was a bit of a God when it came to intelligence testing. There are basic rules and patterns to look for in number sequences etc. which if you know what they are can allow you to walk some of the tests that some of the airlines out there use. Go to the library and ask for a search or WHSmith will do one under the Author: Eyesenck, or ask someone like Waterstones to recommend something. Its not hard.

Some aptitude tests will be little more than a maths test as described above (CABAIR initial tests spring to mind). Other will involve a little more detail. At this point I recommend you search for ‘WWW’s Big CEP Thread’ where I outline in more detail some strategies for passing the more involved tests and indeed the subsequent interviews. However, to expand now on the MICRPOT tests.

Basically these are the dogs what-nots as far as pilot selection goes. Believe me there is no other test in the world that is as well designed, regularly updated, perfectly validated, sensitively weighted as the MICROPAT tests as used by the RAF, British Airways and others. The data for these tests at the design stage was drawn from both the UK and US military experience and is constantly updated through testing done at OASC and other places. It is one of the few test batteries that has been designed for European use and then retro engineered for the US. It is very fair and even fun to use if you can overcome your nerves. For those that have done the test before and think they have an advantage I can report that having done the test myself more than a dozen times and knowing all about it my scores have not improved more than 5 percent from the first series in 1990 to the most recent in 1999.

There is nothing much you can do to ‘move’ your scores but the following may help. Wear a digital watch with a stopwatch on the day to keep time on certain tests. Lag behind on the computer tests by reading the instructions twice – you can then usually see (or hear) how you neighbour is getting on with the tests and learn from his mistakes. Do make sure the rudder pedals are central to you and exercise your legs on them to get a feel for the huge travel and lack of resistance involved. On the ‘Landing Aeroplane’ test turn the keyboard though 90 degrees so that the throttle functions (increase – decrease) works in a logical sense (back – forward). Hold the ‘joystick’ at the base not the handle. Its very long and has no resistance to movement. Greater accuracy can be obtained (especially if you have flying experience) from holding the column at its base. If you find yourself totally confused by the joystick tracking exercise because its back-to-front compared to flying then a little trick is to turn the joystick upside down and rest the base on the edge of the desktop – the stick then acts in the ‘natural’ sense with regard to left and right.

Other important things to note are that on the exercise where you have to distinguish between hostile and friendly aircraft and decide to launch or cancel a missile it is far better to make a quick but wrong judgement for the RAF and far better to make a slow but correct judgement for British Airways. Lets not get into the arguments about why – its just the case. Oh and on the RAF test sequence they get you to remember up to 9 digit numbers. Practice along the lines of ‘chunking’ things into 3 digit numbers. On the BA tests they go for asking you to simply subtract numbers. If you are the County darts champion then you will laugh in the face of this one but to us normal people make sure you practice 453 – 87 = ? until your ears bleed.

One of the last things I wish to address is the issue of Verbal Reasoning. It is very difficult to the point of being hopeless to try to improve your vocabulary or verbal reasoning skills ahead of a test. I would not bother if I were you. However, it is worth knowing the dictionary definitions of Irony, Inference, Assumption, Implication, Expectation, Conclusion, Arbitrary and Insinuation. There are others but this is a good start.

If you read this and the ‘Big CEP Posting’ plus the generic guides for Wannabes on the main site you will be well prepared for the aptitude day. Please, and I mean this, do not become distraught if you fail to meet the standard on the day. The margin between Pass and Fail can be very slight and you may have fallen just marginally short. I know many people who have failed an aptitude test at one place only to pass somewhere else. I also know people who have passed one or more test and then failed another. Just treat it like a lottery. If you never pass any test then for Gods sake don’t write off a career in aviation – nobody tested Wilbur Wright, Amy Johnson, Douglas Bader or even Brian Trubshaw (allegedly). You are in good company and you will find that a decent personality coupled to enthusiasm and hard graft will serve you better than any amount of hand-eye co-ordination. Trust me.

Well that’s the last of my beers drunk and its time for bed. If you have any individual SPECIFIC questions on aptitudes testing then feel free to Email me. Please bear in mind that I am rather busy at present developing my own aptitude for teaching people to fly – it may take a day or two to reply. Best of luck to all of you out there, I know only to well what it is like to pitch up for tests and then wait for the results. Keep smiling and if you can – please post your experiences here on PPRuNe so that a wider audience can learn from you. Whilst I’m current at the moment I’ll soon be out of touch… Safe Flying and Good Luck - WWW

[This message has been edited by Wee Weasley Welshman (edited 30 November 1999).]