AJA Officer Academies Entrance Examination common mistakes
AJA Officer Academies Entrance Examination · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Selecting the answer option that repeats words from the passage rather than the option that restates the passage's meaning.
Word-matching is fast and feels confirming under time pressure, and distractors are deliberately built from vocabulary lifted out of the text.
What to do instead
Cover the options, write a five-word paraphrase of the relevant sentence, then uncover and pick the option closest to your own paraphrase. Reject any option unless you can point to the specific sentence that supports it.
Answering 'which statement is NOT supported / all of the following except' items as if they asked for the true statement.
The stem becomes a blur when the reader scans only for content words, and the final negation is the easiest word to skip.
What to do instead
Before looking at the options, circle or underline the negation and write 'find the FALSE one' beside the stem; re-read the stem once after choosing to confirm you answered the question asked.
Spending four or five minutes on one multi-step calculation while later one-line questions are never reached.
Answering in strict order plus reluctance to abandon work already invested makes a hard item feel like it must be finished.
What to do instead
Apply a 90-second rule: enter a placeholder answer, mark the item, and move on. Return on a second pass. Never leave a blank if there is no penalty for guessing.
Dropping units during working: treating 'percentage points' as 'per cent', mixing minutes with hours, or giving the answer in the wrong unit.
Numbers get manipulated as pure symbols on paper, so the unit never travels with the value and a mismatched answer still looks plausible.
What to do instead
Write the unit next to every figure in the working, convert before calculating, and run a magnitude check ('would a train really be 3 m long?') before selecting.
Choosing an option because the name or term is familiar rather than because it can be placed by office, country or date.
Familiarity is misread as knowledge, and distractors are drawn from the same topic area so they feel equally recognisable.
What to do instead
Before choosing, state one verifiable attribute of the answer (who held the post, which country, which decade). If you cannot, treat the item as unknown and eliminate by category or era instead.
Assuming a complicated transformation when a simple rule such as rotation or a count of +1 already accounts for every panel.
Once a complex hypothesis forms, confirming details are noticed and contradicting ones are filtered out, so the simple rule is never tested.
What to do instead
Use a fixed test order: number of elements, position/rotation, shading, size, alternation. Accept a rule only if it holds for all panels, and check a second feature before committing.
Tracking only one feature (for example shape) while ignoring shading, count or position, so two or three options all appear to fit.
Attention latches onto the most visually obvious dimension and the remaining dimensions are never encoded.
What to do instead
Draw a quick feature table across the series (shape, colour/shading, count, position) and eliminate any option that breaks even one feature; the survivor is the answer.
Answering situational items with the personally preferred or morally ideal action rather than what the role, rank and reporting lines require.
Everyday instincts and general ethics can conflict with organisational protocol, so a unilateral or bypassing action can feel like the honest answer.
What to do instead
Score each option on two axes: effectiveness (does it actually solve the problem?) and appropriateness (safety, welfare, reporting, chain of command). Prefer options scoring on both; treat the extreme or chain-bypassing option as a distractor.
Choosing the most dramatic or decisive-sounding option as a proxy for leadership, or choosing silence because action looks risky.
Decisiveness is over-rewarded in everyday judgement and inaction is under-valued, so options are picked for tone rather than for consequences.
What to do instead
Rank-order every option rather than taking the first plausible one, and separate 'acting within your authority now' from 'escalating over everyone's head'. Consider immediate safety, then reporting, then follow-up.
Substituting numbers into a memorised formula without converting to consistent units or checking that the formula's conditions apply.
Formula recall feels like the whole task, so unit conversion and the assumptions behind the equation (constant acceleration, steady current, ideal gas) are skipped.
What to do instead
Write the formula, list the knowns with units, convert to SI first, then compute, then check the order of magnitude against everyday intuition.