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If you are considering joining the US military you’ve probably heard from a friend of a friend “The ASVAB is so difficult, I failed the first time around” This is actually NOT true given that there is no ‘fail’ on the ASVAB. In this article I will help you understand what is meant by ‘failing the ASVAB’ and how you can avoid it.
The ASVAB or Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery is the military version of an academic entrance exam. You are required to achieve a certain score on the exam in order to qualify for your branch of choice, and for a specific, job, rate, or MOS within your chosen branch.
The ASVAB is designed to test you on the various topics and subjects that you have learned throughout high school and can have multiple means of score calculations depending on the aspect looked at.
It is actually impossible to ‘fail’ the ASVAB given that the results are simply given as a number system. Instead you will achieve a certain score that places you in a rank or category as compared to the rest of the country testing.
Every branch will have its own score requirements for both general qualifications and for admission into a specific job, rate or MOS. Therefor when someone says they ‘failed’ the exam they really mean to say that they did not qualify into a category of acceptance for their intended branch or field.
The main scoring system for the ASVAB is the AFQT or Armed Forces General Qualification. This score takes into account the raw score achieved in 4 sections of the overall exam including Paragraph Comprehension (PC) Word Knowledge (WK) Arithmetic Reasoning (AR) and Mathematics Knowledge (MK).
The scores are combined in a very specific formula allowing you to score anywhere from 1 – 99. Your final number or score qualifies you for 1 of 6 categories such that a score of 1-9 puts you in the lowest category (V) and a score of 93-99 places you in the top category (I).
While the requirements are constantly changing, these are the general AFQT requirements from low to high:
31 – Army
32 Marine corps
35 Navy
36 Air Force
45 Coast Guard
As you can see, the general AFQT scores are well below the maxiumum 99 range, in fact, nearly ever single branch allows you to ‘pass’ or qualify by getting LESS THAN 50% of the questions correct.
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