15 questions, 10 minutes
* The Assembling Objects subtest isn’t part of the student version of the test.
Deciphering ASVAB Scores
The Department of Defense is an official U.S. Government agency, so (of course) it provides plenty of detail regarding your scores. When you receive your ASVAB score results, you don’t see just one score; you see several. Figure 1-1 shows an example of an ASVAB score card used by high school guidance counselors (for people who take the student version — see “Knowing Which Version You’re Taking” for details).
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 1-1: A sample ASVAB score card used by high school guidance counselors.
Figure 1-2 depicts an example of an ASVAB score card used for military enlistment purposes.
So what do all these different scores actually mean? Check out the following sections to find out.
Defining all the scores
When you take a test in high school, you usually receive a score that’s pretty easy to understand — A, B, C, D, or F. (If you do really well, the teacher may even draw a smiley face on the top of the page.) If only your ASVAB scores were as easy to understand.
In the following list, you see how your ASVAB test scores result in several different kinds of scores:
Raw score: This score is the total number of points you receive on each subtest of the ASVAB. Although you don’t see your raw scores on the ASVAB score cards, they’re used to calculate the other scores. You can’t use the practice tests in this book (or any other ASVAB study guide) to calculate your probable ASVAB score. ASVAB scores are calculated by using raw scores, and raw scores aren’t determined by adding the number of right or wrong answers. On the actual ASVAB, harder questions are worth more points than easier questions are.
Standard scores: The various subtests of the ASVAB are reported on the score cards as standard scores. A standard score is calculated by converting your raw score based on a standard distribution of scores with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10.© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.FIGURE 1-2: A sample ASVAB score card used for military enlistment purposes. Don’t confuse a standard score with the graded-on-a-curve score you may have seen on school tests — where the scores range from 1 to 100 with the majority of students scoring between 70 and 100. With standard scores, the majority score is between 30 and 70. That means that a standard score of 50 is an average score and that a score of 60 is an above-average score.
Percentile scores: These scores range from 1 to 99. They express how well you did in comparison with
