I took the ASVAB a couple of times, got a 97% in high school, then a few years later score 98% in college. Ended up taking the DLAB, scored a 119 on that, and got sent to Monterey, California to study Chinese. Flunked out and got reassigned to Civil Engineering. I am one of the relatively few engineering troops in the Air Force who can cuss fluently and colorfully in Mandarin Chinese, a skill highly respected in these circles.
Never took it. Didn’t know I could take it. I would not have taken it if I’d known about it; I already had enough tests to take. The idea of killing people didn’t appeal to me at the time so it just wasn’t a career option that was even on the table. I’m told I received a few calls from recruiters but I was never around for them and never spoke to one. Not sure if my folks told them to piss off or if they just didn’t try very hard.
People study for that thing? Really? With a war on, even? Are people honestly that goddamn anxious to get shot at? And honestly, if you have to study for the ASVAB, do you actually learn enough to be usable, or even retain any of it for more than a few months? I just don’t get it.
We had to waste the better part of a day in high school taking it, and it took the better part of a year to get rid of the goddamn recruiters. If Mom hadn’t been such a brick wall and had ever called me to the phone, it probably would have taken even longer. She gave a few of them the rough side of her tongue more than once, and even the smooth side of Mom’s tongue can be pretty abrasive. I never heard her actually say the words “fuck off and die a slow horrible screaming death in a fire” but it was pretty strongly implied.
We had no freaking choice about taking a test that would open me up to more phone related harassment than anything I’ve ever done in my life. Awesome, right? Yeah. And nothing’s cooler in high school than being followed to the bathroom by some Navy dude because he thinks you’re going to cheat on the goddamned ASVAB.
I scored so high on it, especially on mechanical in my gender group, that they didn’t stop calling my mom’s house about me until last year. I’m 30. I started telling them I was a lesbian. Didn’t help. I frankly don’t see how they’re exempt from the “when I say take me off my list you have to do it” rule.
Now that I’m a public librarian I have to deal with the fact that our ASVAB study books get stolen the minute we put them out on the shelves, too. The ASVAB is a never ending curse that follows me wherever I go.
ETA - yeah, it’s always blown my mind that people have to study for the ASVAB. Seriously, do we want you in uniform? Even the really dull kids at my high school made decent scores.
When I took it, the recruiters were impressed. My specific recruiter went “Wow, that’s the highest score I’ve ever seen.” That sure made me proud. Two days later, he was at my house and I said something like “Mom, I have the highest score he’s ever seen, right [whatever his name was]?” He goes “Uh, actually, Nicole has the highest score.” Nicole was my sister’s friend that I shared a math class with. She apparently took the test the day after I did and beat me by, like, two points in code breaking or something.
Every single person in the military spends 100% of their time bayoneting children after raping them. There are absolutely no useful or desirable careers or jobs in the military that are highly sought after in the civilian world, the military certainly doesn’t care about recruiting smart people to do highly complex and technical work, since any old psychopath with a GED can be trusted with nuclear missiles, honestly I don’t understand any of this at all.
Don’t need no stinking test for that.
Just kidding. My dad was career military. Working on aircraft instruments. He took a lot of tests and was highly trained.
Slight hijack: When I was about 7 or so, I filled out a recruiting card I got from a magazine and a Navy recruiter came to the house. Mother was embarrased but they both got a laugh out of it.
I was in community college wasting my time and still struggling with it when an army friend of mine convinced me to enlist. I was a dope smoking, drunken long-haired anarchist but what the hell, eh? He took me to the recruiter station on the back of his motorcycle. Good first impression.
During the initial interview, the recruiter knew I wasn’t serious because I was drunk and stoned at the time. He told me where to go to take the test and told me to come back in a few days and he’d give me the results and we’d go from there. I think he did it just to get rid of me.
When I returned to his office, his attitude was totally different. He was very friendly and I was, once again, very stoned. After a few niceties, he basically gave me this book and said “that’s every MOS (job) that the army has. You can pick anything you want to do. You can go anywhere in the world that you want.”
I never cared to find out my actual score, but if he was “giving me a choice” versus saying “this is all you’ll be good for”, I figured I did pretty well.
As opposed to a friend of mine, who had to have the recruiter “coach” him while actually taking the test in order to get him to pass.
P.S. In the end, I picked a medical MOS (because I wanted to go to med school later), and I picked to be stationed in Germany, because that’s where this army brat was born. I just wanted to see the city, but it was a great tour.
Did they change the scoring system for the ASVAB? I see some of you are talking about getting a 99 or 97 percent for the entire test, but IIRC, when I took it, we got a whole list of scores. I don’t think there was a cumulative score. I got a 99% on three…language-y categories (fuck you, commas, I will destroy you!) and much shittier scores on everything else.
I think the scoring is different based on which service is looking at your results too. I guess they use the same data pool, but tailor the outputs to what their needs are.
Mostly. You go and take the test, and you get a score sheet with basically three different things on it (I even dug mine out for this). First is the “standard scores”, which are the standard “how well you did on each section”. I have no idea what exactly the number means, but I’m pretty certain it’s not a percentage (because there’s no way I got a 76% on the “word knowledge” part.
The second part is your “composite scores”, divided by service. Each service gets a row of abbreviations with a number under it, each derived by some formula involving various combinations of your “standard scores”. These are used for actual job eligibility - you need a combined score of x on all the mechanical sections to join as a mechanic or whatever.
Then there’s the AFQT (which stands for…something?) which is just a percentile score. You need to be in a certain percentile or above to join, and the standard varies by service (I think the absolutely minimum you can have to join the Army is, like, 10, which is kind of a terrifying thought that you would even consider giving responsibility of some sort to someone who did that poorly).
So looking at my score sheet from when I took it there’s like two dozen numbers I could name as my “score”, and which of them are important depends on what job in what service I’d want.
I took the short version for the Army Reserve local office in about 1988.
I missed one question on the math, IIRC. Warrent officer looks up: “Bitch” (and I’m male). I looked at the question and realized I just bubbled it wrong. I didn’t join.
I got one wrong because, being used to using the metric system, I forgot to convert from square feet to square yards.
I’m inclined to think my problem would be insubordination, not knowledge.
I took the ASVAB when I was considering joining the Army a while back (ended up going Air Force instead). When we drove out to the MEPS station to take the test, there was a kid who was REALLY hyped to join the Army. Kid knew about all the weapons and vehicles and everything. He scored something like a 17, and didn’t qualify for anything they had at the time. Felt kinda bad for him.
True story…I took it when I was an aimless teen, not sure what to do, and was eyeing the military.
I sent it back to the recruiter and got a call a week later to come back in. I did so, and he said I’d scored amazing in all sections except there was a problem with one of them.
I’d scored perfectly, and his scoring sheet (translating number of questions missed to a percentile of the maximum score via a table) didn’t directly account for missing zero questions on the table. It was of course easy to logic that missing zero means 100% and therefore the score would be “xxx”, that was also helpfully labeled outside of the table as “maximum score”. I explained this to him, pointing out how, via the table, you can infer how many points each correct answer was worth and how that matches perfectly with the maximum score…
The recruiter just couldn’t get it, and actually told me he’d call me to come back at a later time because he’d have to make some calls about what score he needed to write down, since “either the test or the table is broken…something’s wrong here.”
I’ve since met hundreds of brilliant people with military backgrounds and have huge respect for servicepeople and sometimes regret not going down that path…But at the time, that recruiter being the first representative of the military that I’d ever met, he so soured me on the military that I never went back or considered them as a career. It’s unfortunate that my first impression was with the bottom scrapings of the barrel.
You know, you’re right. Who we need running the nuclear missiles are people who can’t be arsed to go to recruiting station and take the test on their own, or ones who are so spineless they can be harassed into doing something they don’t want to do. Or even better, the ones who either so dumb or so ignorant they have to study to pass the test.
I mean, who else are you going to get to join up based on forcing high school kids to take the ASVAB and then calling them every week for the better part of a year? People who actually want to be in the military will find a recruiter and take the test on their own. People who don’t want to be in the military and have actual spines aren’t going to join just to make the damn recruiters stop calling. So where is the benefit of mandatory testing or study guides?