Civilian employers generally use a person’s education and experience level when selecting candidates for a job position, but in the military, the vast majority of all enlisted jobs are entry-level positions. The military doesn’t require you to have a college degree in computer science before you’re hired to become a computer programmer. You don’t even have to have any previous computer experience, nor does the military care if you do. The military sends you to advanced individual training (the school you must complete after basic training) to teach you everything it wants you to know.
Sounds like a good deal, right? So what’s the catch? Well, believe me — the military spends big bucks turning high school graduates into highly trained and skilled aircraft mechanics, language specialists, and electronic-doodad repair people. In an average year, the services aim to enlist about 150,000 new recruits. Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of combat boots! Each and every recruit has to be sent to a military school to train for a job. Uncle Sam needs a way to determine whether these recruits have the mental aptitude to succeed at that job — preferably before he spends people’s hard-earned tax dollars.
Enter the ASVAB. The services combine various ASVAB subtest scores into groupings called composite scores or line scores. Through years of trial and error, the individual military services have each determined what minimum composite scores are required to successfully complete its various job-training programs. In this chapter, you discover how those test scores translate into finding the military job of your dreams.
Eyeing How ASVAB Scores Determine Military Training Programs and Jobs
Each service branch has its own system of scores. Recruiters and military job counselors use these scores, along with factors such as job availability, security clearance eligibility, and medical qualifications, to match up potential recruits with military jobs.
For active duty, the Army is the only service that looks at the scores and offers a guaranteed job for all its new enlistees, aside from those enlisting in the infantry or trying out for Special Forces. In other words, nearly every single Army recruit knows what his or her job is going to be before signing the enlistment contract. The other active duty services use a combination of guaranteed jobs or guaranteed aptitude and career areas:
Air Force: About 40 percent of active duty Air Force recruits enlist with a guaranteed job. The majority enlists in one of four guaranteed aptitude areas, and during basic training, recruits are assigned to a job that falls into that aptitude area.
Coast Guard: The Coast Guard rarely, if ever, offers a guaranteed job in its active duty enlistment contracts. Instead, new Coast Guardsmen enlist as undesignated seamen and spend their first year or so of service doing general work (“Paint that ship!”) before finally applying for specific job training.
Marine Corps: A vast majority of Marine Corps active duty enlistees are guaranteed one of several job fields, such as infantry, avionics, logistics, vehicle maintenance, aircraft maintenance, munitions, and so on. Each of these fields is further divided into specific sub-jobs, called Military Occupational Specialties (MOSs). Marine recruits often don’t find out their actual MOSs until about halfway through basic training.
Navy: Most Navy recruits enlist with a guaranteed job, but several hundred people each year also enlist in a guaranteed career area and then strike (apply) for the specific job within a year of graduating boot camp.
Space Force: You can’t yet enlist directly into the U.S. Space Force (USSF). As of 2021, you can only transfer in from your current position in the Air Force. The USSF expects to accept transfers from the Army and Navy by fiscal year 2022/2023 and may open enlistment to new applicants after that.
SEMPER SUPRA: THE ASVAB AND THE ALL-NEW SPACE FORCE
The sky isn’t the limit anymore. The United States Space Force, the sixth military branch, operates under the U.S. Air Force (like the way the Marines are a department of the Navy). Right now, the branch is only accepting current airmen who transfer from the regular Air Force. Eventually, when the Space Force begins to accept new enlistees, it’ll come up with its own AFQT and line score requirements. If you’re reading this book with the intention of eventually transferring to the USSF, you should set your sights on Air Force Specialty Code 1C6 (Space Systems Operations) or a job in acquisitions, engineering, intelligence, or cyber operations. Your recruiter can give you the most up-to-date information.
All enlistment contracts for the reserve forces (regardless of branch) contain guarantees for a specific job. Why? Because reserve recruiters recruit for vacancies in specific reserve units, usually located within 100 miles of where a person lives.
Understanding How Each Branch Computes Line Scores
A line score combines various standard ASVAB scores to see which jobs or training programs you qualify for. The standard scores are your scores on the individual ASVAB subtests (with Word Knowledge and Paragraph Comprehension combined as a Verbal Expression score):
General Science (GS)
Arithmetic Reasoning (AR)
Auto & Shop Information (AS)
Mathematics Knowledge (MK)
Mechanical Comprehension (MC)
Electronics Information (EI)
Assembling Objects (AO)
Verbal Expression (VE), the sum of Word Knowledge (WK) and Paragraph Comprehension (PC)
Each of the military services computes its line scores differently. Some calculations even include dummy scores — average scores received by thousands of test-takers — for Numerical Operations (NO) and Coding Speed (CS), subtests that are no longer part of the ASVAB. The following sections outline how each branch comes up with its line scores.
Line scores and the Army
To compute line scores for job qualification, the Army combines the various scores into ten separate areas by simple addition of the ASVAB standard scores. Table 2-1 shows the line scores and the ASVAB subtests that make them up.
TABLE 2-1 The U.S. Army’s Ten Line Scores
| Line Score | Standard Scores Used | Formula Used |
|---|---|---|
| Clerical (CL) | Verbal Expression (VE), Arithmetic Reasoning (AR), and Mathematics Knowledge (MK) | VE + AR + MK |
| Combat (CO) | Arithmetic Reasoning (AR), Coding Speed (CS), Auto & Shop Information (AS), and Mechanical Comprehension (MC) | AR + CS + AS + MC |
| Electronics (EL) |
General Science (GS),
|