(a)The number of persons originally enlisted or inducted to serve on active duty (other than active duty for training) in any armed force during any fiscal year whose score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test is at or above the tenth percentile and below the thirty-first percentile may not exceed 20 percent of the total number of persons originally enlisted or inducted to serve on active duty (other than active duty for training) in such armed force during such fiscal year.
(b)A person who is not a high school graduate may not be accepted for enlistment in the armed forces unless the score of that person on the Armed Forces Qualification Test is at or above the thirty-first percentile; however, a person may not be denied enlistment in the armed forces solely because of his not having a high school diploma if his enlistment is needed to meet established strength requirements.
An AFQT score is derived from the ASVAB(essentially the militaries’ IQ test). IQ scores are based on a normal distribution of scores from the general population with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. So the 30th percentile represents an IQ score of 92 while the 10th percentile would correlate with an IQ of 81.
not to double reply to you but the issue here isn’t training versus not training for the test; the issue is that psychiatrist and psychologist can’t rotely sort out what influences “training” and other activities actually had on the results of the test versus what a theoretical, “pure” test result would’ve been. frankly i’d imagine different psychologist in different context would want to control for this in a variety of ways. maybe in one experiment, telling the population not to train is the best way to get at the data you want. but for the most part? no. absolutely not. the claim that telling people to not train or study for an IQ test somehow is a be all end all control for wanton influences & noise in IQ results is total bunk. think about this. what even qualifies as studying for an IQ test? is the teenage boy incidentally studying for his ACT’s at the same time as a population IQ test, who consequently scored higher than the median average for his age range, cheating or invalid in his results? most people and psychology studies would likely say no, not really. this demonstrates some of the fundamental flaws in IQ and g-factor that psychologists have to recognize while working with them. there’s truly no real way to sort out what is “cheating/invalidating” on an IQ test versus what data is potentially legitimate. because objectively speaking, what IQ measures is incredibly subjective. on top of all that, either way, it’s impossible and impractical to try and control for every single thing people do in their daily lives.
EDIT: stray “a” removed