If you are a high school student or graduate student who wants to join the United States Armed Forces, you will first have to take the military version of the entrance exam. Vocational Aptitude for Armed Forces battery, also known as ASVAB. This exam will test your math skills among other topics. Kicker, you NOT allowed to use calculator
What kind? No calculator?
Many potential recruits are discarded by this concept. While living in the modern era, where everything is a smartphone application or a computer, click the mouse, the idea of doing math without a calculator may seem ridiculous
But in fact, this is a brilliant move on behalf of military testers. You see, they are not looking to see if you can spew out the information that you learned while you were in high school and possibly in college. Instead, they try to test the skills of knowledge, understanding and inference that you choose along the way
In the army, they are not interested if you can press a few buttons to get an answer. Instead, they want to find out if you can reason your way through potentially simple and even difficult problems. For this reason, instead of providing complex math questions that can be solved at the touch of a button, they provide you with a combination of simple and complex mathematical reasoning that require you to think and develop a strategy to solve each concept.
How it helps
If you are a dedicated student, motivated to achieve your military career dreams, then you will probably be preparing for ASVAB questions without a calculator. You read all this, right?
In your preparation, you must plan for many practical problems, similar to the ones you will test during the actual ASVAB exam. When studying these problems, you should study not only how each type of question can be solved, but also a good approach without a calculator.
The more problems you experience, the more concepts you will learn. Over time, you will begin to develop a strategy that will help you get around the requirements for electronic solutions and will instead give you the skills to solve any math problem that the military can give you. But not only will this practice style help you with your math skills, you may find that this learning style also helps to improve your results in other test areas. After all, who says that the development of the critical and analytical mind is limited to one section?
