ATSA Time Management: Pacing a 3.5-Hour Test

The FAA describes the Air Traffic Skills Assessment as a 3.5-hour computer-based test. Almost everything that makes it difficult is downstream of that: the content is ordinary, the clock is not. Pacing is therefore a skill worth practising in its own right, separately from getting questions right.

Some sections are not meant to be finished

This is the first thing to internalise, because it inverts a habit most people bring from school and university. In an academic exam, running out of time means something went wrong. In a speeded aptitude test, not finishing is normal and expected — the test discriminates by how far you get with accuracy intact.

Candidates who do not know this lose time twice: once to the questions, and again to the anxiety of watching the clock beat them. Expect it, and it stops being information about how badly you are doing.

Decide your policy before you sit down

Under pressure you will not invent a strategy; you will fall back on a habit. So choose the habit in advance, per section:

• Fast visual scanning — Number Differences, Visual Relationships. Policy: first confident answer, move. Do not re-check. Re-checking on these costs more than the occasional error it prevents.
• Working memory — Memory Variables. Policy: protect the tracking above all. If you lose the thread you lose every subsequent item, so a moment spent re-anchoring is worth more than a rushed answer.
• Multi-tasking — the ATC Simulation. Policy: the primary task keeps running whatever else happens. Dropping the secondary prompt occasionally is survivable; losing the main picture is not.
• Personality — Work Style. Policy: steady and honest, no deliberation. Deliberating here does not improve anything and makes your profile less consistent.

Guessing, and when it is right

On a speeded test where finishing is not expected, an item you skip is worth nothing and an item you guess quickly may be worth something. Unless a section tells you that wrong answers are penalised, leaving an item blank because you were unsure is usually the worse of the two options — but do not spend time deliberating your way to a guess. The value is in it being fast.

Read the instructions for each section rather than assuming. They are the one place the actual rules are stated, and the seconds spent there are the best-spent seconds in the test.

Pacing across three and a half hours

Section pacing is only half of it. The other half is the sitting as a whole, and it is the half nobody practises.

• Concentration is a budget. Attention spent fretting about a section you have already finished is unavailable for the one you are in. Closing off a section mentally when it ends is a trainable habit.
• The hard sections do not arrive first. Assume you will meet something demanding when you are already tired, and train for that specifically.
• Use whatever breaks you are given, properly. Stand up, breathe, look at something further than an arm's length away.
• Eat and drink beforehand like it is a long exam, because it is one.

How to practise pacing, as opposed to content

Working one section at a time for a few minutes builds familiarity with the formats. It does not build pacing. To train pacing you need to reproduce the conditions:

1. Practise slightly faster than is comfortable. If you are always answering within your comfort zone you are not finding your accuracy edge, which is the thing the test measures.
2. Do timed runs, with the timer visible. Getting used to a clock in your peripheral vision is part of it.
3. Do at least a few long sittings — several sections back to back — so that hour three is not the first time you have experienced hour three.
4. Note where your accuracy falls off, not just your score. If you are fast and wrong, slow down a fraction; if you are accurate and unfinished, speed up. The optimum is uncomfortable in both directions.

One thing that is not a pacing problem

If you are consistently running out of time and making errors on the items you do reach, the issue is familiarity rather than speed — you are still spending attention on working out what the section wants. That is fixed by more exposure to the format, not by trying to go faster. Going faster on a format you do not yet know just produces quicker mistakes.

Every section has a free demo, which is the cheapest way to find out which of the two problems you have. Try Number Differences for a sense of the speeded sections, and the simulation for the multi-tasking.