ASTB-E and OAR Practice: the Navy’s Officer Aviation Test

Each question depends on your last. Right answers are usually followed by harder questions and wrong ones by easier questions. Each part draws from a library of several hundred items, and your score takes account of how hard the questions you met were, so two people who saw different questions can be compared.

You cannot skip, go back or change an answer. Once you press on, the answer stands. Read every option before you choose.

Unreached questions cost you. If time runs out before you have answered enough, a penalty is taken off, and it is larger the more questions you leave. NMOTC’s advice is “Work quickly but don’t guess”: guessing at random as time runs out will, in most cases, do more damage than the penalty. Keep a steady pace from the start instead.

A part can end before the clock. An adaptive part may stop early once it has measured you. That is normal and carries no penalty, and it is why the number of questions differs between candidates.

The OAR, from 20 to 80. It comes from the maths, reading and mechanical tests, in one-point steps, and predicts academic performance at Officer Candidate School. Most examinees score between 40 and 60.

AQR, PFAR and FOFAR, from 1 to 9. Candidates who sit the whole battery also get the Academic Qualifications Rating (ground school), the Pilot Flight Aptitude Rating (pilots in primary flight training) and the Flight Officer Flight Aptitude Rating (naval flight officers). Pilots are selected on AQR and PFAR, flight officers on AQR and FOFAR. These are stanines, which map to percentiles as below.

The formulas are not published. NMOTC says only that they are compensatory: a strong part can make up for a weak one. You see your scores as soon as you finish.

Minimums differ by programme and service. The Navy sets them in Navy Personnel Command Program Authorizations 106 and 107, and the Marine Corps in Marine Corps Order 1542.1I. As of March 2023, the minimum to apply as a Navy pilot was an AQR of 4 and a PFAR of 5. For the OAR, about 35 for Navy OCS and 40 for Coast Guard OCS are commonly quoted (November 2026) but are not officially published. Ask your recruiter or officer selection officer for the figure that applies to you.

Three attempts, for life. Older forms of the ASTB (Forms 1 to 5) do not count towards them. A false name or Social Security number makes an illegal test, which can be invalidated and still counts as one of your three.

30 full days between attempts. The gap runs from finishing one attempt to starting the next and cannot be waived. If you retake the full battery you sit all of it again; scores are not mixed from different attempts.

The latest score counts. Your most recent attempt replaces every earlier score, even if some were higher. Retake only when you expect to do better.

Each game adapts the way NMOTC describes the real test: harder after a right answer, no going back, a penalty when time runs out with questions unreached, and an early finish once it has measured you. The questions are our own, written to the content NMOTC lists, with US spelling and units as on the test.

Your result is our estimate on the OAR’s 20 to 80 scale, not an official score. The real item calibration and formulas are not published, so the number tells you roughly where you stand and which part to work on. It is not a prediction of the score NMOTC will give you.

NMOTC does not publish question counts or time limits. Ours use the reported ones: the Math Skills Test up to 30 questions in 30 minutes, Reading Comprehension up to 20 in 30 minutes, and Mechanical Comprehension up to 30 in 15 minutes. Some guides give 40 minutes for the maths. The ANIT uses the fixed form’s 30 questions in 15 minutes from before 2013.