Last week I had my first test for a Chevron Phillips chemical plant operator. I just received an email informing me that i passed the test and that they would like me to come back next week to take the COBRA test. There is little information on the web about the test on the internet, so I am curious if anyone is familiar with the test and can provide any information on what i whould be studying and preparing for.  I am trying to do as much as possible to prpare myself because this job would be great for me and the pay is very good as well.

Thanks

Well I hope this helps you. I took this test in June for a gas pipeline controller job with the company I'm employed with. The acronym stands for Console Operator Basic Requirements Assessment. It is a CBT. You will be given 4 hours more or less to take it. The first hour you are introduced to the program and how to navigate it. The second hour you will use the program to control valves, fans , a burner to maintain levels and temperatures in the cracker and in the product tank and in the storage tanks and get familiar with how things relate to each other. Pay attention as those relationships will give you your key to passing this test.The 3rd hour will be a series of 4 15 min practice scenarios with increasing difficulty. The final hour is the most important. You will be given 4 casualty scenarios with each getting more difficult. The final scenario is the hardest and you are given multiple equipment failures and have to react to them to keep the plant operating as safely and to minimize tank flares as much as possible. You will get a tank flare. It is setup for you to get one no matter what. It is grading you on your ability to multitask, prioritize, keep calm, rational and think about what is going on and how things in the plant affect each other. There will be alarms and phone calls you have to take care of to throw you off of you game. It is essentially operating a very basic oil refinery. Watch your trend graphs closely especially the I believe the 1 min one. It will give you the quickest assessment of what your plant is doing. The longer time frame trend graph I found to be almost useless due to it being a 5 min graph and each assessment  test is only 15 min long. It reminded me of a computer game and I actually found it to be enjoyable. Good Luck!!

Interesting.

Kobayashi Maru simulation.

This guy joined cobra

OP did you take troubleshooting in school?  Did you do the associates in Process Tech?

This test sounds like the troubleshooting class at San Jac.

 

Cobra test questions:

What does the Cobra consider the best implement for cutting pizza:
A. Fingers
B. Throwing knife
C. Scissors
D. Pizza cutter



Fill in the blank Bonus question:
What does the Cobra keep in his egg carton?  __________

Scissors and Cleaning Kit, what do I win?

Check out this link http://www.getcobra.com/sub/getcobra_c_04.htm; here is another link with a screen shot http://www.jps-usa.com/en/GCG/Project_Descriptions/cobra.htm  
Spend some time thinking about what these mean.

• Selective attention (the ability to concentrate in the face of distractions)
• Problem sensitivity (the ability to determine at the earliest stage when something is wrong)
• Time-sharing (the ability to multi-task)
• Reasoning (the ability to think through how an action will trip off a string of subsequent actions)
• Resistance to premature judgment (the ability to not "over-operate" the console)
• Speed of closure (the ability to make sense out of large amounts of process information)
• Response orientation (the ability to quickly choose between two or more actions)

The test is designed for people who have no experience to see if they have the aptitude to do the job––think positively, you would not have gotten this far if you were not smart enough to do the job, good luck.

Check this out too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_refinery.

They want you to "talk to the one-eyed spitting cobra".

Once again afrcom comes through with great info. keep it coming guys.

Anyone know if there is a practice test available?

Nice job! Take care of our own... Hooah!

Been reading up on the test. Anybody else have any tips?  This is big deal for me.

There could be a market for this in the simulator game market.  farming, bus driving, trash pickup, sailing...whatever

I'd play a game like this or a game that simulated running a nuclear power plant.





 

Where's my damn monkey?

Ok my test is a day away! anything else I should know?