What a stanine is
A stanine ("standard nine") is a way of converting a raw score into a single digit from 1 to 9, where the middle of the scale (4, 5 and 6) covers roughly the average two-thirds of a population, and the tails (1-3 and 7-9) cover the below- and above-average extremes. It's a standard psychometric scale, not something specific to CBAT or the RAF — the same nine-band idea shows up across military and civilian aptitude testing generally.
Two things matter for how to read a stanine result: it's a band, not a precise percentile, and it only means something relative to the population it was built against. A stanine of 5 says "solidly average for this group," not an exact ranking.
Role requirements you can actually source
The RAF does not publish a complete current table of subtest weightings and thresholds for every role — this is stated plainly on the CBAT guide's own pass-marks section. What follows are historical, candidate-reported overall cutoff figures, not an official current publication. Treat them as informed estimates rather than a guarantee, and see the source register for exactly what's established versus independently inferred.
- Pilot: reported overall cutoff 128
- Remotely Piloted Air System (RPAS): reported overall cutoff 100
- Weapon Systems Officer (WSO): reported overall cutoff 100
- Air Operations (Control) Officer 1: reported overall cutoff 80
- Air Operations (Control) Officer 2: reported overall cutoff 90
- Air Operations Systems Officer: reported overall cutoff 90
- Intelligence Officer: reported overall cutoff 95
- Weapon Systems Operator (Linguist): reported overall cutoff 90
- Weapon Systems Operator (ISR): reported overall cutoff 90
- Weapon Systems Operator (Rotary Wing): reported overall cutoff 90
- Weapon Systems Operator (Mission Equipment): reported overall cutoff 90 — GSPA is named by the guide but is not identified or implemented in this trainer.
For the Pilot role specifically, including which domains carry the most weight and which modules train each one, see the RAF Pilot preparation page.
What CBAT Academy's estimated scores mean
Where CBAT Academy shows a stanine-style value, it's the Academy normalising your own practice or assessment result onto a nine-band training scale — useful for seeing whether a module is trending up or down, and for comparing modules against each other at a glance. It is not produced by an official assessment's norm group, and it does not reproduce any official scoring algorithm.
Read the full scoring methodology page for exactly how these estimates are calculated, and what they can and can't tell you.
Official thresholds vs. Academy estimates
These are two genuinely different things, and this page tries not to blur them:
- Official thresholds — set by the RAF, not published in full, and the only version that actually determines a selection outcome. Anything on this page describing a specific cutoff number is historical candidate-reported data, not a current official publication.
- Academy estimates — CBAT Academy's own training feedback, built from your practice and assessment history, useful for tracking progress and spotting weak domains. Never a substitute for an official result, and never presented as one.
Official joining instructions and recruiter guidance always take priority over anything on this page.
See where you stand
Check your scores with a CBAT Academy assessment
Run an assessment to get your own Academy-estimated stanines across every domain, tracked over time.