As with most things of this nature, there's the perfect world of rainbow-farting unicorns and there's the real soul-crushing world we actually inhabit.
Talk to guys not long ago, and you'll get all sorts of "I can't believe they let me in with ___" stories. Pot waivers for O's weren't uncommon, for example. If they were otherwise well qualified, they got in. That's not because things were better or worse, just that supply and demand for officer candidates were aligned much differently. Now that we're in a drawdown AND the economy is so-so, the services can be more selective.
You can argue that they should be more in tune with the "whole person" concept, etc, but simply put, if you have a pile of 100 applications, all pretty good, and 10 slots, then your first task is finding some easy discriminators to winnow down your in-box. X SAT--check. X GPA--check. No arrests---check. Sure, that arrest may be no big deal in the big picture, but if there are 10 other guys with about the same qualifications that don't require a ton of work to verify their bonafides, what do you think an OSO or board is going to do?
It may not be "right," but neither are a lot of things. It's just the way things ARE. I wish that each application could have a case worker personally marshall it through the application process and explain each applicant's whole life story in context, but that's not going to happen. Big institutions use chainsaws to do brain surgery. That's how they roll. Some otherwise well-deserving people don't get their big break--that's how it rolls.
Talk to guys not long ago, and you'll get all sorts of "I can't believe they let me in with ___" stories. Pot waivers for O's weren't uncommon, for example. If they were otherwise well qualified, they got in. That's not because things were better or worse, just that supply and demand for officer candidates were aligned much differently. Now that we're in a drawdown AND the economy is so-so, the services can be more selective.
You can argue that they should be more in tune with the "whole person" concept, etc, but simply put, if you have a pile of 100 applications, all pretty good, and 10 slots, then your first task is finding some easy discriminators to winnow down your in-box. X SAT--check. X GPA--check. No arrests---check. Sure, that arrest may be no big deal in the big picture, but if there are 10 other guys with about the same qualifications that don't require a ton of work to verify their bonafides, what do you think an OSO or board is going to do?
It may not be "right," but neither are a lot of things. It's just the way things ARE. I wish that each application could have a case worker personally marshall it through the application process and explain each applicant's whole life story in context, but that's not going to happen. Big institutions use chainsaws to do brain surgery. That's how they roll. Some otherwise well-deserving people don't get their big break--that's how it rolls.
