Spatial Integration

You can now practise just the question type you keep getting wrong

The breakdown after a run has always told you which kind of question cost you the marks — "Fuel: 1 correct, 4 wrong" — and then left you to sit the whole test again to work on it, which means doing the three kinds you are already good at as well.

That row now has a button. Press it and you get a practice run of nothing but that kind of question: same generator, same difficulty, same worked answers, just the one you are losing marks on.

It shows on Airborne Numerical, Spatial Integration and the Situational Awareness Test, which are the tests that label their question types clearly enough for it to mean something. It appears only on a row where you actually dropped marks, because a button on a row you got right is only in the way.

You can now see whether you are keeping pace, if you want to

Every timed question test has a bar: a number of correct answers in a number of minutes. Until today that number was only ever shown to you afterwards, on the results screen, and the run itself gave you a clock counting down and a question number counting up without ever saying whether the two were in step.

The briefing now does the division for you. Our bar on Directions and Distances is 48 answers in 16 minutes, which is about 20 seconds each, and that sentence is on the page before you start. There is also a tickbox: turn it on and the run tells you "on pace" or "behind pace" next to the question number, with how many you should have answered by now.

That 48 is our own training benchmark, set deliberately above a competent standard so clearing it here leaves you margin on the day. It is not a published pass mark, and we have no way of knowing the real one.

It is off unless you ask for it, and it is remembered once you do. The real test shows you nothing of the kind, and a rehearsal you have to switch back to being faithful is not much of a rehearsal.

Why it was built: looking at everybody with four or more runs of the same test, people do get faster with practice on almost every test here. On Directions and Distances they barely do, and some candidates are answering at about a third of the speed the target asks for while getting most of what they attempt right. They were not making mistakes. They were running out of time, and nothing on the screen had told them.

One honest limit. The guide counts answers against a bar that counts correct ones, so it is telling you the least you can get away with rather than the figure to aim for. If you are getting four out of five right you need to attempt rather more than the target to reach it.