To answer a few more questions. As far as the next six weeks go, its all academics. The only time you see your DI is for morning PT or if you or your class start to slack. I'm not really sure about the comment about them having problems with the DI's, I know nothing about that or haven't heard anything. The reason our class team gave us for the new schedule was they wanted to get rid of the pump and dump type of memorization that occured in academics. Now its more of a college semester, where you have all of the classes concurrently and finals at the end.
I'm not exactly sure how the PT was run beforehand, but now you are broken up into three groups for running on MWF: slow, medium and fast which is dependent upon your in PFA. Which If you're borderline on any of the three, do whatever it takes to improve your scores. Your in PFA will be less than it has in the past. For one thing, you have DI's and Chiefs walking around making sure you are doing everything the OCS way. If you came in through BDCP or any other college program, your recruiter's PFT was probably a little more lax and you were given probably a few more minutes of rest in between each set. Don't rely on those scores, they are higher than what you will get at OCS. Another reason is that you won't be at 100% from the lack of rest the previous few days. Most people that I talked to scored an average of 1 min slower, 10 pushups and 15 situps lower than the normal. My advice is focus a little bit less on the run, if you can do it in 10-11 minutes you'll be just fine. You definately don't run as much as you'd think. And the running that we've done so far is easy. Focus more on the pushups and core workouts like leg lifts and crunches.
As far as what jg5343 said about maxing in is absolutley true. You can't improve if you max out initially, and you will be left alone, which is exactly what you want. As far as the pussyfication of OCS, that depends upon how you look at it. I'm sure the next six weeks are going to be a joke compared to the previous three weeks. But the first three weeks are not easy, and according to the the upper classes, are a lot more intense physically and stresswise than it was for them. Again, its hard to compare because these are two totally different schedules. People can argue this back and forth, but lets leave that for another thread, lets just try to use this one for the gouge of the new schedule.
To answer the other two questions, OCS is 12 weeks, with the last 3 the Candio Phase. Be prepared for no sleep for 24-36 hour periods. But as a candio you get caffeine.
