Navy lowers entrance exam requirements in bid to get more recruits

As the military struggles to attract new recruits, the Navy on Monday began a pilot program that will let in those with lower scores on part of the entrance exam to gauge a recruit's ability to serve.

Potential sailors are required to take the Armed Forces Qualification Test, or AFQT, to determine whether they are qualified to serve, as part of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, better known as the ASVAB.

Under the Navy's pilot program, the service will accept lower scores on the AFQT, between the 10th and 30th percentile, as long as the prospective sailor's ASVAB individual line scores are still high enough to qualify for a Navy rating.

"The change means that prospective Sailors who have high enough ASVAB line scores to qualify for a Navy rating will not be held back by a low AFQT score, which can vary relative to how their peers did on the test," Navy Recruiting Command spokesman Cmdr. David Benham said in an email.

An individual's qualifications for various Navy ratings are based on 10 different ASVAB scores that help the service identify where a sailor would best fit within the fleet. Benham said that such job determinations are not based on their overall AFQT score.

"To qualify for enlistment, the individual must still meet the minimum line score requirement for a given Navy rating," Benham said. "These ASVAB line score requirements are unchanged by this policy and not waiverable." <Source>

For those of you who are not familiar with the Vietnam Era, this was tried by LBJ in 1966 with Project 100,000, which lowered the minimum required score for the Armed Forces Qualification Test. It was a disaster. The newly qualified soldiers were slow learners, routinely incompetent and undisciplined, and in combat were dangerous to themselves and their comrades. Their fatality rate was three times that of soldiers who met the previous qualification standard.

You can get the details in a book titled "McNamara's Folly."

That the Navy is doing it again after that experience, in an era when cognitive demands of military service are higher than they were 50 years ago, is gross negligence towards those who are already serving and damaging to national security. <Source>

The Armed Forces Qualification Tests (ASVAB, PiCAT, and AFCT) are made up of nine sections. Each section's score achieved will produce its own line score used when determining eligibility for specific jobs and programs. The ASVAB section topics are:

• General Science (GS)
• Arithmetic Reasoning (AR)
• Word Knowledge (WK)
• Paragraph Comprehension (PC)
• Mathematics Knowledge (MK)
• Electronics Information (EI)
• Auto Shop (AS)
• Mechanical Comprehension (MC)
• Assembling Objects (AO)

Verbal (VE) is not a separate section of the ASVAB. VE is your raw WK+PC scores compared to a table associated with your test version.

The minimum line scores for each rating and program eligibility are determined by the Bureau of Naval Personnel using many factors including the specific "A" school academic drop-out rates.

The line scores defined on this page are for ASVAB tests taken after 2004. The ASVAB was normalized in 2004 based on the results of the Profile of American Youth study conducted in 1997 (PAY97) by the Department of Defense and the Department of Labor.

For those wishing to see the scores necessary for each of the Navy's ratings, it can be found at PAY97 ASVAB line score requirement for each Navy rating and program.

Examples…

Retail Services Specialist - VE+AR= 83

Logistics Specialist - VE+AR=92 (The Logistics Specialist rating was established as a result of the merger of the Storekeeper (SK), and Postal Clerk (PC) ratings in October 2009. )

Missile Technician Submarine - AR+MK+VE+AO=218 or VE+AR+MK+MC=218