How Army Orientation works
Each item opens with two rules about a pair of arrows, one above the other. One rule sets colour and position, such as “White ABOVE Black”. The other sets direction, such as “Down Left BELOW Up”. Arrows are black or white and can point along the diagonals as well as up, down, left and right.
When you continue, the rules disappear and cannot be revisited. Six pairs of arrows take their place, and you choose the one pair that follows both rules. Mindmill, which hosts the Army’s practice test, describes the skill as visualising and manipulating shapes.
How to hold two rules at once
Turn the words into one picture before you continue:
- Rewrite every BELOW as top-then-bottom. “Black BELOW White” means white on top, black underneath.
- Merge the two rules: which colour is on top, and which way the top and the bottom arrow point.
- Hold a short phrase such as “white up-right over black left”, not the original wording.
- On the answer screen, check the top arrow for colour and direction, then the bottom one. Most wrong pairs break only one of those four details.
Worked example
Rule 1 says “Black BELOW White”. Rule 2 says “Up Right ABOVE Left”. Together they describe one picture: a white arrow pointing up-right on top, and a black arrow pointing left underneath.
Of the six pairs, one has the colours swapped, one has the white arrow pointing straight right, one has the black arrow pointing down-left, and two have both arrows the wrong way. Only white up-right over black left obeys both rules.
Tips for the real Orientation section
- Learn the arrow style and the rule wording on the Army’s free practice site, so test day is not your first look.
- Get quick at naming diagonals: up-right points to the top-right corner of the screen, down-left to the bottom-left.
- Build the picture on the first read and continue. Rereading the rules word by word wastes the clock without fixing them in memory.
- If two pairs both look right, one has a small direction error. Choose, move on, and do not let one item eat your time.
Practise Orientation on CogniPrep
Our Orientation drill runs for 5 minutes with no countdown on screen and new items until the time is up. Each item shows two rules, then six stacked pairs once the rules have gone, with arrows in all eight directions. Answers carry BARB’s guessing correction, right minus wrong divided by five, and you get a score out of 100 and an estimated GTI. The 5 minutes is a preparation site’s figure, as the Army publishes none.