(a)The number of persons originally enlisted or inducted to serve on active duty (other than active duty for training) in any armed force during any fiscal year whose score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test is at or above the tenth percentile and below the thirty-first percentile may not exceed 20 percent of the total number of persons originally enlisted or inducted to serve on active duty (other than active duty for training) in such armed force during such fiscal year.
(b)A person who is not a high school graduate may not be accepted for enlistment in the armed forces unless the score of that person on the Armed Forces Qualification Test is at or above the thirty-first percentile; however, a person may not be denied enlistment in the armed forces solely because of his not having a high school diploma if his enlistment is needed to meet established strength requirements.
An AFQT score is derived from the ASVAB(essentially the militaries’ IQ test). IQ scores are based on a normal distribution of scores from the general population with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. So the 30th percentile represents an IQ score of 92 while the 10th percentile would correlate with an IQ of 81.
Personally I agree that the military is as good of a sampling of intelligence as the general population, but there is something to be said about the potential issue of a normal distribution bias. (Up or down) If there was an analysis on it I’d wager that the correlation coefficient would be very close to 1. I just wish that the critics of this simplification would avoid portraying the ASVAB as having NO correlation with IQ.
People mention that there’s some dumb mfers in the military. My friend included.(I’ll let you decide on which side of that assessment he’s on lol) but I think it’s a familiarity bias. You’re forced to work with(and against) those individuals no matter your intelligence level in the military. In contrast, people in the general population tend to work mostly with people that are around their own level of intelligence unless it’s customer service.
Heh, never thought about this before, but that probably explains why both people in either customer service or the military tend to be jaded, cynical people, lol.