One In Four Military Applicants Fail Entry Exam

[Formaldehyde]

MObby has a good point if this is the ASVAB or whatever that test that all kids take is. I know I didnt try at all on mine

According to the article, the only people included were those who were already prescreened as military applicants, which included already having a high school diploma. These were not high school students. There were only 350,000 over a 6-year period.

The article also states that the results corroborates the findings of other tests:

Tom Loveless, an education expert at the Brookings Institution think tank, said the results echo those on other tests. In 2009, 26 percent of seniors performed below the 'basic' reading level on the National Assessment of Education Progress.

Like I said, the thread title is misleading.

The very first paragraph of the AP article:

Nearly one-fourth of the students who try to join the U.S. Army fail its entrance exam, painting a grim picture of an education system that produces graduates who can't answer basic math, science and reading questions, according to a new study released Tuesday.

Various googled news headings:

One In Four Military Applicants Fail Entry Exam

Study: Nearly a quarter of takers fails Army entrance exam

Almost half of state's young black Army applicants failed enlistment exam, study finds

Schools MAKE you do a (4 hour) test for army recruitment?

No, of course they don't. The entire test sequence for actual candidates, which this was the first part, is only 3 hours long:

Recruits must score at least a 31 out of 99 on the first stage of the three-hour test to get into the Army. The Marines, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard recruits need higher scores.

 

[Flying Pig]

Wait, kids can't do basic addition so the answer is corporal punishment and increased phys ed?

Well, over here we do both. Our schools aren't so much concerned with breeding exam-sitters (or the public [US: private] schools aren't, can't speak for the state schools but they apparently don't share this view) but they see themselves as 'adult training centres'. A 'gentleman' should be intelligent and educated enough that nobody thinks he's stupid, and able to chat up that girl from Cheltenham with a line from Catullus, but a large part of the British education system has always been games, meaning rugby and cricket for the most part.

God save the Queen!

I'm glad to see you admit most kids want to do better than Army.

Do 'better'? OK the pay's not great, but there's nothing to compare for the lifestyle and the way that doing the job influences the way you live and the sort of person you are. It's a choice: not everyone likes it, but it's no 'better' or 'worse' than any other lifestyle choice. Except being a stinking civvy, of course

Risking your life to make sure that some miserable islands in one part of the world continue to belong to some other miserable islands on the other side of the globe?

You're right, I can't immediately think of anything that compares

I was thinking more getting everything free, but I was actually meaning there's no other job in which you live like that. I don't know if it's just an ex-mob thing, but next time you're out in the city look around at the people - if you see a short-haired, clean-shaven man of fairly muscular build, walking with his back straight and head up, wearing jeans and possibly desert boots, he's a soldier. There's no other job that you can pick out like that. Try it - it's the walk that gives it away, I'm told.

 

[Tacitusitis]

there's nothing to compare for the lifestyle

Risking your life to make sure that some miserable islands in one part of the world continue to belong to some other miserable islands on the other side of the globe?

You're right, I can't immediately think of anything that compares.

 

[Patroklos]

Obviously.

The important thing is averages.

I doubt it, as the officer corps takes the same exams and they are the second largest concentration of academic achievement in this country outside academia itself.

 

[Flying Pig]

I doubt it, as the officer corps takes the same exams and they are the second largest concentration of academic achievement in this country outside academia itself.

I take it officers do additional selection having passed them (our Royal Marines have the same idea: all ranks sit the recruit test then officers are tested further to establish 'effective intellect' - common sense - by the Admiralty). Not wishing to argue where I'm not informed, but how do you get that statistic and what does 'academia' precisely mean? I would have thought that there are more super-intelligent lawyers and doctors than officers.

 

[Patroklos]

Its been ten years since I took the entrance tests, but the major one is the ASVAB and they simply have higher score thresholds to qualify for officer. I do remember taking pilot specific tests but other than that I don't remember any other testing of a noteworthy nature. There are a couple batteries of oral interviews, and I had to interview with a Congressmen when applying to the academy.

The officer corps thing is based on our collective stats as an organization. I am sure doctors do have a higher average, but they are not a single organization like the officer corps. They also don't have a formal organizational division from the rest of their staff like the officer enlisted relationship does.

The same goes for lawyers and the like, no cohesion as a professional group. Most lawyers only have their basic law degree which is on par with a masters. Any officer above O3 has to have a masters to avoid forced retirement, so most get one as an O3.

 

[Tacitusitis]

"No cohesion as a professional group" - Lawyers have the bar. Engineers have the OE.

As George Bernard Shaw once said, "All professions are conspiracies against the laity" meaning that lawyers certainly have as much of a "guild feeling" as West Pointers do.

Admittedly that feeling is certainly much less in the parts of academia that don't lead towards vocation-qualifying degrees (i.e. the liberal arts and the hard sciences).

 

[Flying Pig]

Its been ten years since I took the entrance tests, but the major one is the ASVAB and they simply have higher score thresholds to qualify for officer. I do remember taking pilot specific tests but other than that I don't remember any other testing of a noteworthy nature. There are a couple batteries of oral interviews, and I had to interview with a Congressmen when applying to the academy.

The officer corps thing is based on our collective stats as an organization. I am sure doctors do have a higher average, but they are not a single organization like the officer corps. They also don't have a formal organizational division from the rest of their staff like the officer enlisted relationship does.

The same goes for lawyers and the like, no cohesion as a professional group. Most lawyers only have their basic law degree which is on par with a masters. Any officer above O3 has to have a masters to avoid forced retirement, so most get one as an O3.

Ah right, fair enough - did they tell you that one when you were working in the recruitment office by any chance? Entirely true, but more than a bit sneaky as a statistic.

O3 being (counts on fingers) captain, so majors and above need a masters degree? Actually I was involved in a discussion not so long ago which came to the conclusion that although the yank officers of junior rank had a tendancy to be slightly over-brainy, the way you manage senior officers (packing them off to university halfway through their careers) is far better than our system for breeding the sort of general that you need. I think after a while we decided that you should give your entire armed forces to us and we'll let all your seniors work in Whitehall and the map rooms where they belong.

PS: Officer-enlisted? Looked twice at that one (british english "enlisted" = American English "conscripted").

 

[Zelig]

I think at the same time there's kind of a catch-22 thing going on here... if too many people get into the army, we hear that the standards are too low. If too few get in, it's because the education system is broken.

Don't worry, it's quite possible to have both of these problems.

I doubt it, as the officer corps takes the same exams and they are the second largest concentration of academic achievement in this country outside academia itself.

You doubt that averages matter? We should be picking single random data points instead?

 

[Holycannoli]

I'm actually surprised that many can pass the test, I really am. Education in this country has gone down the drain, and it's not just a problem with funding or finding teachers. Kids (and many times parents) simply do not care about school or education, and that means you cannot just throw money at the problem to fix it.

 

[Flying Pig]

You doubt that averages matter? We should be picking single random samples instead?

Er... isn't the point of picking a random sample that it comes out with an average reading for the group?

 

[Zelig]

Er... isn't the point of picking a random sample that it comes out with an average reading for the group?

Apologies, I used poor terminology in reference to statistics, I've edited my previous post. (Yes, that is correct, as to what a sample should do.)

 

[Murky]

Not necessarily. We actually have people across the entire spectrum join the military.

It would be interesting to know the statistics on the general makeup of the military. My impression was that most enlisted people are from rural areas or inner city areas and most do not come from wealthy families. The officers tend to be from either military families(with longstanding traditions of service) or are the better educated people from middle-class families. Course, there are always a few who buck the trends. There are probably some officers who went through the Army's ROTC program that came from poor families.

 

[Patroklos]

In the case of the officers you will find that correlation with any organization that has a hiring requirement based on education.

 

[Murky]

Don't most libraries have practice exams for the ACT/SAT that they could learn before taking the basic assessment test? I seem to recall taking an assessment test in high school just to see how I scored.

 

[otago]

Are you really that surprised? Parents freak out if a teacher dare say or do anything that might make a kid suffer a self-esteem hit. Bring back corporal punishment big time so teachers can start to get a handle on the kids instead of letting them run amok, start holding the kids back when they don't deserve to go forward, and increase phys. ed.

Corporal punishment, interesting, guess what would have happened to any teacher who touched one of my kids ?

 

[NovaKart]

I don't remember any military recruitment test in my high school and I went to school in Kentucky, not a liberal place.

 

[MobBoss]

The very first paragraph of the AP article:

Like I said, its the ASVAB. Do you think the Army turns those folks away? Or do they simply re-test them so they can pass?

Of course they re-test them. The ASVAB is a test taken in high school and kids routinely poo-poo it off fully knowing its for the military. I know many of my friends did when we took it in high school, and my kids confirm the same thing is the case in their experience today.

 

[TheDanish]

No required military test here in Maryland

 

[JollyRoger]

I think I scored high enough to qualify for a career outside the military.