30 September 2018

Join Me For Drinks

Some interesting news (well, not news to some):
For the first time since 2005, the U.S. Army missed its recruiting goal this year, falling short by about 6,500 soldiers, despite pouring an extra $200 million into bonuses and approving some additional waivers for bad conduct or health issues.

Those who've been paying attention know that the military has been lowering the bar to recruitment for decades. Fatter, dumber, and crazier after all these years:
Only about 30 percent of 17- to 24-year-olds meet the physical, mental and moral requirements for the military, and only one in eight are interested in serving.

Only about 30 percent of Americans are the The Manchurian President base. That means 70% aren't thin enough, smart enough, and sane enough. Now we know where the base comes from. Coincidence?

Last October, Army said it would meet its goal:
The Army will reach its goal of 80,000 new soldiers without compromising quality, predicted Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Snow, who leads its recruiting command.

Well, no.

Turns out, not too surprisingly, that the problem has been reported for some time. Here's 2006:
Replacing a gunner who'd scored Category IV on the aptitude test (ranking in the 10-30 percentile) with one who'd scored Category IIIA (50-64 percentile) improved the chances of hitting targets by 34 percent.

Is this stat sig?? Not reported, but I'll guess that it's close to population data, so it's just numbers.

Which gets me to wondering: have the Cats been re-defined over time? That is, is a Cat III or IV less intelligent now than in the past? Has there been a double whammy here? The wiki has some history.
The ASVAB was first introduced in 1968 and was adopted by all branches of the military in 1976. It underwent a major revision in 2002. In 2004, the test's percentile rank scoring system was renormalized, to ensure that a score of 50% really did represent doing better than exactly 50% of the test takers.

Was 'renormalized' just another way to cheat dumber kids into the Service? Well, here's contemporary pushback against that accusation.
"We don't want people to think we are lowering the standard of quality coming into the Air Force," Ms. Strickland said. "It appears that way because 36 is lower than 40, but it will still be the same quality of applicants we are accepting into the Air Force today."

That newspeak for: "we've found that all these kids are dumber than in years past, so we've lowered the raw score to meet the percentile we've previously used." The assertion made by DoD is that kids got smarter from 1980 to 2004, so raw scores needed to be lowered to meet the median (IQ?) that existed in 1980.
"Potential servicemembers in the last 20 years, simply put, have gotten smarter," Ms. Strickland said. "So the scores have shifted."
Do you believe that? Make you feel better?

We hear all about, esp. in Military recruiting adverts, how the "new Army/Air Force/Navy" is more tech savvy. Which means more tech savvy personnel. One meme is that video gaming prowess is now a plus. Yes, it's true.

Here's some other data. It's from the wiki, but as usual is heavily linked. It shows that, even after boosting the raw scores with a renormalization, math and verbal SAT scores have been and continue to decline. Is it likely that college aspirational students would be in decline, while HS/GED students are ascendant? I thought so.

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