Monday, November 07, 2005

asvab on campus?

the armed services vocational aptitude battery is a placement test the armed forces use to decide who's gonna to do what job once they make it through boot camp / basic training. i first saw one at the recruiting station around the corner from the texas employment commission in downtown fort worth in january 1982, when i went in to talk to a recruiter about enlisting in the air force. now they're apparently administering this test to high school students, sometimes under the pretext of it being mandatory. when i was on active duty, we always hated recruiters because, well, um, they lie. the ones in fahrenheit 9/11 were typical; it's like any other high-pressure sales gig. when i worked for the local alt-weekly rag, i wrote a piece about some of the sleazy tactics they were using before recruiting numbers tanked post-"mission accomplished" in iraq. now they've gone one step further -- from strong-arming schools for personal information to pre-qualifying prospective recipients of their sales pitch.

thanks to tammy for the link.

3 Comments:

Blogger stashdauber said...

wow. i talked my way out of h.s. in '74, a year before nam-era mandatory selective service registration ended, so i didn't realize how long it'd been standard prac to administer the asvab to high schoolers.

5:43 AM  
Blogger Getting rid of my beer gut said...

Yeah, we were encouraged to take it too, but I never got around to it.

10:30 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I took it as a HS Jr in early 86, and did well enough that (like mikey) all the branches of the services were calling. A very nice Sgt. Cordoba from the Army came out to the house to show me movies on the walls of the living room about how great the Army was, how much it could do for me, and how patriotic it would be to serve my company.

IIRC everybdy took the ASVAB as a part of our regular schedule. Everybody. And from what we saw later all the results were handed right over to the services.

12:55 PM  

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