These are not rocket science, but a good slice of the American public who consider themselves reasonably bright would be failing a lot of these questions if they were asked them cold.
For Advanced Math, Question 2, I honestly don’t understand how any of the options are correct.
8-4-4
if you have 12 you could have 8 of one color and 4 of another and none of the third.
You need 13 to ensure the third color.
Not everyone is cut out to make general.
Heh, I began my enlistment at a point in my life when my self-esteem was probably its lowest. My recruiter called me when he got my ASVAB results:
Recruiter: Mr. Montoya, your ASVAB score came back…
Me: Oh yeah? Did I do ok?
Recruiter: …um, are you kidding?
Me: That bad huh?
Recruiter: Jesus no! According to this you’re some kind of genius or something!
He then signed me up for the DLAB which I kicked ass in and in 4 short months morphed from a 190 pound underemployed chimney sweep to 165 pound Arabic Linguist with a bright future and no student loan (Army paid it off as part of the enlistment).
“Captain, the enemy are coming in hard and fast, and we are seriously outgunned. I don’t think we’re gonna make it through …Unless… wait! of course That guy in Johnson’s squad is some kind of expert with Commas, get his ass over here.”
“Dammit, man, we’re surrounded by subordinate clauses! Get wolfman in here to start some new sentences–nobody can find extra capitals like he can!”
Laugh now dogface, but it’s the PowerPoint commandos that get advanced in the One Man Army.
You mean the US Chairforce…
I took the ASVAB in high school because it got me out of English for the day. I did fantastically well on all the language parts, and horrendously on all of the mechanical parts. There were all these diagrams of contraptions with questions like “if pulley A is pulled, what will happen to wheel C?” Yeah, I have no idea.
Turns out that the army doesn’t care if you can read and write - if you are horrible at mechanical ideas, they don’t want you. I got one half-hearted call from a recruiter who seemed grateful to hang up when I told him I was going to college in the fall. All my friends traded schemes for getting the recruiters to stop calling, but I never really had any need of them.
Depending on when you were in high school, that’s not really true. My mother is a retired chief master sergeant, and she got teased for years because her mechanical skills result was a 12 or something ridiculously low. For her career field, there was no need for mechanical skills (and obviously she did rather well without them).
This would have been in 1996.
Obviously, I could be wrong about why I wasn’t heavily recruited. The guess that it has something to do with the fact that I did so abominably on that portion of the test is my own.
That’s cool, I just wanted to clarify that non-mechanical people aren’t totally out of luck if they’re interested in the military. I always thought it was interesting that no one ever attempted to recruit me (other than through direct mail postcards:)), even though both my parents are military.
And as for the ASVAB’s difficulty: I’ve done ASVAB tutoring before for high-school students looking to get into the military, and I can say that at least the mathematical materials seemed very difficult for them. Of course, all my students were by definition kids who’d done poorly on the test initially and so qualified for extra help, but I was still surprised by how unprepared they seemed for the material.
I love how one of the topics is “commas.” God knows we could use some better advanced comma training amongst the general population.
Erk. I scored in the 97th percentile as a high school sophomore. Now I can’t even remember how to do the basic algebra stuff.
Ah, I misread the question. Thanks. Had me totally confused.
.
Yeah… I scored in the 99th percentile in everything. The only way I got them to stop calling me was to give in and enlist in the Navy. Which didn’t actually stop them from calling, but I was able to get rid of them fast by saying I was already taken.
Hey, I was a Chairborn Ranger.
Remember, clerks never retreat–just backspace.
I was the only person in my entire class that didn’t take the ASVAB. We were told it was mandatory and it would help us even if we didn’t go into the military. I had my mom write a note excusing me and handed to a very confused guidence counselor who seemed rather upset that they wouldn’t get 100%. It was really weird because I still had the classes I shared with seniors or sophmores with the teacher being really surprised to see a junior there, but all the “juniors only” classes were just cancelled. I’d walk to my next class and there was a dark empty classroom. I ended up spending most of that day in the library surfing the internet. I also took a nap in one of the empty classrooms.
Oh, and I still got calls from recruiters. :smack:
So…
We have an “all volunteer” military which has co-opted the edcational system to pre-screen cannon fodder for them…
The only time I saw that test was in the induction center. Imagine - 1971 and they flunked out more than half of the kids on the bus from my small town to the induction center 50 miles away. Made the few who were taken REAL happy. Yes kids, there was a draft on as well as a war almost as obscene as W’s attack on Iraq