What the test is
The formatA single horizontal string of digits appears for exactly five seconds, then disappears and is replaced by one multiple-choice question: how many times did a given digit appear. The format never varies: always the frequency of one digit, always five seconds, always multiple choice. Only the string length grows, from around five digits to around fifteen.
Format description from the published CBAT TMI test guides
(rafcbat.wordpress.com) and the Air Defence Academy test guides
(airdefenceacademy.com/testguides).
Skill area: Perception, memory and attention.
What candidates say
These points come from people who have sat the test, gathered from forums, community chats and candidates who wrote to us afterwards. Nothing here is quoted or attributed. Each point is graded by how many separate accounts back it up.
✓ Well established! Single account✕ Outdated? From the published guides
Difficulty comes from string length alone. Nothing else changes between the first question and the last.
That means the right strategy changes partway through. Short strings you can memorise whole and count afterwards. Once you’re past ten digits or so you have to track frequencies live while the string is still on screen, because there won’t be anything to recall.
Track the high-frequency digits in the closing seconds, not the rare ones.
A digit that appeared once or twice you can often recover by elimination. One that appeared four or five times you can’t. Spend the last second of the display window on whatever’s repeating.
Nothing is scored on how fast you answer afterwards. The whole test lives inside the five-second display window.
So don’t rush the answer. Once the string is gone, take the time to reconstruct properly. There’s no clock pressure left to react to.
Listed as not included in the Royal Navy FAT version.
One of three tests dropped from the Navy version, along with Dynamic Projection and Numerical Operations. Worth checking against your own service before you build a schedule around it.
Practise it on SkyWatch
Our Code Duplicates game flashes a string of digits and asks how many times one of them appeared.
You can play it without an account.
500+
practice runs played
on SkyWatch
on SkyWatch
Every SkyWatch game is our own CBAT-style practice version, built from what candidates report. None of them is the real test.
Related tests
- Target Recognition Test (TRT)target search
- Visual Search Testthe symbols and numbers test
- Vigilance Testthe star grid
Read more
This page is one part of the complete CBAT guide, which also covers how the day runs, the pass marks and the domain minimums. Or see every CBAT test on one page.