I would hope the application review is holistic. There’s much more to a person than scores/numbers. And aren’t highly recommended candidates go through the rolling board instead? Or does that not exist anymore?
I didn’t know an entire NRD could be pushed to the next board. From my previous conversations with an OR, he basically told me that if something was missing in your application, you’d automatically get rolled into the next. But he also explained that even though you have everything submitted on time, it’s up to the next person in that wonderful chain of command to do their job and ensure they push your application up — which is why recruiters stress (at least to me) to submit everything early.
When it comes to aviation it comes down to money, it cost money to send people through the aviation pipeline, it cost more money to train aviators than it does IWC, SWO, Supply and as such they go with the best indicator which is the PFAR or FOFAR. I can't tell you how many people I have seen go "I was a D1 team captain for XXX" or "I was president of my sorority" and they were not picked because they had minimum scores. I saw a guy with a 3.5 something in engineering get denied twice until his scores hit 8's. If a person wants their application to be looked at for everything they have done they should apply to a Supply board as they are pretty much the only one that does that.
Rolling boards have not been used for years, like many other things they are on the books so if they decide to use them in the future they can as it is easier to have something and not use it than want to use something and need to get it approved from scratch again.
If something is missing it will get kicked back to the NRD as it needs to be corrected before going to board, if there is enough time it can be submitted back to NRC, some NRD's will hold kits like was mentioned to "sandbag" or try to "game" the system and that often never works out for those that try it, now it can help the ones that push the kits forward as better chance for their submissions to get selected. The other option could be that the approving person at the NRD drags their feet and then they are not uploaded in time, I saw it where 1 processor was on leave and they other had many kits to upload the next day which was the deadline but then she ended up being sick so all those people missed the deadline.
