United States military applicants may soon be able to use calculators while taking entrance exams as government officials grapple with recruitment troubles.
President Joe Biden’s (D) Pentagon is weighing a policy regarding the devices that would “change how applicants take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB,” Fox News reported Monday.
The news comes as many Americans, who are of age for the military, have experienced difficulty making adequate scores on the test to qualify.
A June 2022 report said the Pentagon was falling short of its recruitment goals, and officials were considering dropping some of its disqualifiers for military service.
According to Breitbart News:
It is not exactly clear how bad the problem is for every branch, but the Army — the military’s largest branch — is facing historic struggles. It has met only about 40% of its enlisted recruiting mission for fiscal year 2022, which ends in three months on September 30.
In hopes of meeting its goal, the Army last week announced it is dropping its requirement for recruits to have high school diplomas or GED certificates if they can ship to basic training by October 1, according to Military.com.
On Monday, a defense official told Fox in a statement, “The department is carefully considering the use of calculators for the ASVAB.”
“We are taking a systematic approach, which will assess the impact of calculator use, and we are developing a way forward for calculator inclusion based on best practices in test development and psychometric theory,” the official continued.
During an interview with Breitbart News in March, House Armed Services Subcommittee for Military Personnel Chairman Jim Banks (R-IN) criticized the Army regarding a report about wokeness and recruiting.
“The Army is hiding behind some report that they won’t even release the methodology behind that report, that says that wokeness isn’t affecting recruitment in the military, but they can’t prove it,” he explained, adding, “They don’t want to release it because they know the methodology is faulty.”
WATCH — EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Jim Banks Blasts DEI-Focused Army for HIDING Recruitment Survey Data
In June, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth claimed, “We’re not a woke Army.”
“And I do think that that constant drumbeat that we sometimes hear about a weak military, a woke military, is a little bit of a negative drip, drip, drip that is undermining our recruiting at a time where we really can’t afford that,” she added.
WATCH — Army Secretary: Woke Military Criticisms Are Hurting Recruiting
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