Growing hesitancy over a military test
by Dan Hardy and Dylan Purcell
Every school year, at hundreds of high schools across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, students are asked - and sometimes required - to take a vocational aptitude test with a strange-sounding name - the ASVAB, which stands for Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Since Vietnam, the test has been a powerful peacetime recruiting tool for the Pentagon; hundreds of thousands of student scores have routinely been sent to the military each year, typically leading to follow-up calls from recruiters. But with the nation at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, school districts have in recent years been opting out of the test in droves.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, 8/6/2008