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The work of the Committee on Military Enlistment Standards is sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Personnel and Readiness) and funded under Defense Supply Services Contract MDA903-90-C-0028. The views, opinions, and findings contained in this report are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as an official Department of Defense position, policy, or decision, unless so designated by other official documentation.
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COMMITTEE ON MILITARY ENLISTMENT STANDARDS
Bert F. Green, Jr. (Chair),
Department of Psychology, Johns Hopkins University
David J. Armor,
Institute of Public Policy, George Mason University
Jack R. Borsting,
School of Business Administration, University of Southern California
Frank P. Brechling,
Department of Economics, University of Maryland
James A. Hoskins,
The Wirthlin Group, McLean, Va.
Robert L. Linn,
School of Education, University of Colorado, Boulder
Bengt Muthén,
Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles
Charles R. Roll, Jr.,
The Rand Corporation, Washington, D.C.
Richard J. Shavelson,
Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara
Alexandra K. Wigdor, Director,
Division on Education, Labor, and Human Performance
Anne S. Mavor, Study Director
Carolyn J. Sax, Administrative Associate
Preface
The Joint-Service Job Performance Measurement/Enlistment Standards (JPM) Project was initiated over a decade ago in response to congressional concerns regarding the quality of the All-Volunteer Force. In its initial stages, the project's efforts were devoted to demonstrating the feasibility of using hands-on tests to measure the job performance of enlisted personnel. The purpose was to provide a criterion measure based on job performance that could be used to validate the selection test used by the military to screen applicants for enlisted service. This stage of the project resulted in the construction of valid job performance tests and the collection of data for a cross-section of military jobs.
In the past three years, the focus of the project has been on incorporating job performance into the development of a cost/performance trade-off model to be used by military manpower planners in making decisions about recruit quality goals. This model links recruit quality to job performance on one hand and recruit quality to personnel costs on the other. Understanding these linkages provides a clear rationale, based on performance and cost differences, for choosing applicants for military service.
In June 1993 a workshop was held to present the cost/performance trade-off model to military manpower analysts as a tool for planning and justifying various mixes of recruit quality. At the workshop, presentations were given by individuals involved in developing the model, by Service representatives who had either used or carefully reviewed the model, and by members of the Committee on Military Enlistment Standards.
This report provides a set of papers on which workshop presentations were based. The context for the workshop and the need for the cost/performance trade-off model are introduced by the first paper, which examines trends in the quality of military personnel from the beginning of the All-Volunteer Force to the year 2000 and beyond. Other papers discuss technical issues associated with the development of the various components of both cost and performance linkages and present applications of the fully developed model. Following opening remarks by W.S. Sellman, Director of Accession Policy, Office of the Secretary of Defense (Personnel and Readiness), Part I provides an overview of the enlistment standards project. Part II includes two papers on job performance measurement issues. They represent two approaches to generalizing performance results to jobs for which no performance data are available and to interpreting job performance scale scores. Part III includes two papers describing the cost/performance trade-off model and its applications.
The committee is indebted to the workshop presenters and participants for their contributions to the success of the workshop. In addition to the authors included in this volume, the committee would like to extend its thanks to William Carr, Gerald Laabs, Captain Gary Macomber, and Major James Thomas for their thoughtful comments on the use of the cost/performance trade-off model. We also gratefully acknowledge the support and encouragement of Dr. W.S. Sellman, Director of Accession Policy, and his staff, Lt. Col. Thomas Ulrich and Jane Arabian. Finally we wish to thank Carolyn Sax for her efforts in planning the workshop and preparing the manuscript for production.
Bert F. Green, Jr., Chair
Anne S. Mayor, Study Director
Committee on Military Enlistment Standards
Contents
Opening Remarks: The Nexus Between Science and Policy |
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Military Manpower Quality: Past, Present, and Future |
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Setting Performance Goals for the DoD Linkage Model |
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Predicting Job Performance Scores for Jobs Without Performance Data |
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The Accession Quality Cost/Performance Trade-off Model |
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Policy and Management Applications of the Accession Quality Cost/Performance Trade-off Model |
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