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Comment by leroy_masochist

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Comment by leroy_masochist

There's a bogus argument about GCT scores in this article:

> In Joint Force Quarterly, Matthew F. Cancian showed the long-term trend in intelligence among Marine officers. Comparing the absolute scores on the General Classification Test (GCT), new Marine officers started a long-term downward trend in intellectual capability starting around 1980. Of concern, “two-thirds of the new officers commissioned in 2014 would be in the bottom one-third of the class of 1980; 41 percent of new officers in 2014 would not have qualified to be officers by the standards held at the time of World War II.” Though data for the other services is not available, Cancian suspects that a similar trend has occurred in them as well.

I'm familiar with this issue in detail. Until the late 90s, GCT scores were a metric used by the Marine Corps for officer MOS assignments, which happen for ground officers during the Basic School, the 6-month infantry leadership course that all USMC officers go to as the foundation of their training (pilots get airframe assignments after flight school). After the late 90s, they stopped using GCT scores as a factor in MOS assignment, but they still kept making officers take the test for poorly articulated reasons. When I took the GCT at TBS in 2006, it was at 7am on a Friday after we had been in the field with little sleep since that Monday; I had gone to bed at around 2am that morning because weapons turn-in had taken forever at the armory. We were told immediately before taking the test that it was only going to be used for data tracking purposes and that we should take it seriously because of the "bragging rights" that came with a high score.

If you take away the incentives to do well on a test and schedule it at a time that is going to ensure subpar performance in all test-takers, it shouldn't be a surprise that people do worse on it than they did in the past when it directly affected their career prospects.

All in all, the article strikes me as more of the same alarmist drivel that has been par for the course in military-related op-eds since Jesus was a lance corporal.

Replies leroy_masochist · 2023-09-19
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