ASTB-E study guide
ASTB-E · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The ASTB-E is the selection instrument the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps use when screening applicants for officer commissioning programs, most visibly aviation roles such as student naval aviator and student naval flight officer, but also several non-aviation officer programs. The ASTB-E study guide has 8 sections and about 2,414 words.
01Math Skills Test (MST)
The Math Skills Test is a timed, no-calculator section covering arithmetic, algebra, and geometry at roughly high-school level. The concepts you must have cold: order of operations; fraction, decimal, and percent conversions; ratio and proportion; exponent rules, including negative and zero exponents; solving linear equations and inequalities; systems of two equations; factoring quadratics; distance-rate-time, work-rate, and mixture problems; averages; and basic probability.
304 words, about 2 min02Reading Comprehension Test (RCT)
The RCT gives you short but dense passages, often drawn from technical, historical, or military-adjacent material, and asks what the author said, implied, or meant. The concepts you need are not vocabulary lists but reading structure: main idea versus supporting detail, primary purpose, the author's tone or attitude, the meaning of a term in context, and inference that is strictly supported by the text.
333 words, about 2 min03Mechanical Comprehension Test (MCT)
The MCT tests qualitative physics, meaning you reason rather than compute. Core concepts: simple machines, with lever classes and mechanical advantage equal to effort arm divided by load arm; pulleys, where the advantage equals the number of rope strands supporting the movable block; inclined planes; wheel and axle; and gears, where two meshed gears rotate in opposite directions, gear ratio equals driven teeth divided by driver teeth, and an open belt keeps pulleys turning the same way while a crossed belt reverses them.
324 words, about 2 min04Spatial Apperception Test (SAT)
The SAT shows you a view out of a cockpit and asks you to identify the aircraft's attitude: banked left or right, nose high or nose low, or a combination. No instruments are provided, only the horizon and the airframe reference.
362 words, about 2 min05Aviation and Nautical Information Test (ANIT)
The ANIT is a knowledge test covering aircraft, ships, weather, and navigation. Organize your study into blocks.
267 words, about 1 min06Performance-Based Measures Battery (PBM)
The PBM is a set of computer-based psychomotor and attention tasks: a UAV tracking task where you use a joystick and throttle to keep a reticle on a moving target, a dichotic listening task where different words arrive in each ear and you respond only to cues from the designated ear, and a multi-task condition that layers tracking, listening, and emergency-light responses together. It measures attention control and coordination, not knowledge, and most candidates improve with practice.
289 words, about 1 min07Biographical Inventory
The Biographical Inventory asks about your background, school and work history, activities, habits, and past behavior. It is not a knowledge test and there is no answer key in the academic sense, but the inventory is scored, and it contains internal consistency checks: overlapping items that ask about the same trait in different words.
271 words, about 1 min08Aviation Interest and Naval Officer Traits
These sections measure motivation and temperament rather than knowledge. The aviation interest portion asks how much you would enjoy flying, working on aircraft, standing watches, and operating in a demanding technical environment.
264 words, about 1 min