Are you exam phobic? Do you fear failing the ASVAB test? If either of your answers to these questions is yes, am sure you are now wondering what you will do to pass the ASVAB. You are drawing up your plan but the little voice within is asking ‘Can I fail the ASVAB?’

Feel at home now, this article has been written to address all your fears and help you eliminate every negative factor that might pull you down and deny you the glorious chance of joining the US army.

The ASVAB is not set to test your IQ level, but rather your suitability for various military positions. It’s like a standardized test, similar to others, and passing or failing is relative. All you need is to attain some minimum score and you can be enlisted.

To give you a better insight into this matter, we will first let you understand how the scoring of the ASVAB works.

SCORING OF ASVAB TEST

Your ASVAB score is used for three vital purposes, to determine your enlistment eligibility, assign you to various military jobs, and help you in your career exploration. This means that, for whatever marks you get, there will be an attached benefit, hence there is every reason to eliminate any phobia as this is a win-win scenario.

When you take the ASVAB test, you will receive the scores for all the subtests as well as the scores for the following composite areas.

• Math ability composite

This is calculated by adding the mathematics knowledge score to the arithmetic reasoning score.

• Verbal ability composite

This is calculated by the addition of the word knowledge score to the paragraph comprehension score.

• Academic ability composite

This is the sum of the math ability composite and the verbal ability composite.

Then there is the calculation of the raw score, which is obtained as a percentile by the following formula:

Raw score (word knowledge score) plus (paragraph comprehension score) plus (arithmetic reasoning score) plus (mathematics knowledge score)

If you get a raw score of 60^th percentile it means 59% of the test takers got a lower score than you, while 40% got better scores that you. The raw score is a very important score to the army recruiter and is commonly known as the AFOQT SCORE.

The last score is the military careers score; this score is derived from your subtest scores by combining the academic ability score, electronic information score and mechanical comprehension score. The lowest you can get here is 140, while 240 is the maximum, 200 counts as the average score.

There are many military careers, therefore it’s highly likely you will find one to match your test score.

The score you get in the auto & shop information and general science do not feature in any of the above mentioned scores.  They are used by the army recruiter to explore other career areas which match your ability and skills.

Now that you know how the ASVAB scoring is done, do you think you can fail the test? Let’s now get to the bottom of this question.

CAN YOU FAIL IN THE ASVAB TEST?

This question is the easiest to answer yet very difficult to comprehend. Failing and passing the ASVAB test will vary from person to person, depending on their career goal. The scoring of the ASVAB test has detailed every possibility of ending up in the army service. There are many jobs offered by the US military and what prevents people from getting them is the score requirement.

Here allow me to describe passing and failing as a relation between you career goal and your test score. For example if your aim is to join the air force you should aim to score high in your raw score.

If your score is too low to get you the air force officer qualification, you have failed relative to your personal goals. However you score might be sufficient to get you another military career, so in general you have not failed.

CONCLUSION

If we generalize the whole matter of the ASVAB test we can conclude that you cannot fail this test. Again if we combine this with the fact that ASVAB test doesn’t test your IQ level, we can say it’s not easy to fail.

However different scenarios may arise and one can fail to get a score for any of the military jobs. Such a case then we can describe as total failure. You should aim to get a good score that will land you your dream military job, rather than giving the recruiters the task of exploring other suitable careers.