Heads up if you chose a competitive school

The OC Josh

5-Year Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2009
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478
Just received this from my top choice Battalion

"All,
You have chosen the Rolling Thunder Battalion (Wheaton College or its affiliated schools) as one of your choices to attend next fall and take part in ROTC. Due to the very competitive nature of the scholarships this year, some new criteria has been added in order to be elligible to receive a scholarship. For the Wheaton College/Rolling Thunder program we are now requiring that all applicants complete an Army Personal Fitness Test (APFT). This is 2 minutes of Push ups, 2 min. of situps, and a 2 Mile run. This is different from the Presidential Fitness (1min, 1min, 1mile) Test many of you have taken. If you have taken the Presidential Fitness Test, YOU STILL NEED TO COMPLETE THE APFT!!!
To be elligible for a scholarship to the Rolling Thunder Battalion please fax or email us written proof of your APFT score. The test can be scored by (in order of our preference) a 1) local ROTC Unit, 2) Local Recruiting Station, 3)PE Teacher. Please understand that the PE teacher is a last resort because we have no way of guaranteeing they are grading to the army standard. Have your grader fill out the Test One column in the attached APFT form."


Thoughts?
 
Due to the very competitive nature of the scholarships this year, some new criteria has been added in order to be elligible to receive a scholarship.
I'm curious how this will work with those applicants that have already submitted their complete ROTC packages for board consideration.
 
Update if you already submitted your application

Answer when asked about packet already submitted

"You have already been awarded a scholarship... As such, I would highly recommend you take the APFT and send us your scores. You are going to have to prove you can pass it before the ARMY begins paying for your school anyway, it might as well be now."
 
OC Josh,

Go to army.com and search on APFT. There is a chart. You probably have to get the 60 pts but check with the ROTC Battalion. If these numbers are incorrect someone will let us know. Are you from Illinois?
Men 17-21
Push Ups Sit Ups Run
50 Pts 35 47 16:36
60 Pts 42 53 15:54
100 Pts 71 78 13:00

Women 17-21
Push Ups Sit Ups Run
50 Pts 13 47 19:42
60 Pts 19 53 18:54
100 Pts 42 78 15:36
 
@AROTC Parent
I don't live in IL, but I want to go to college there.

@DougBetsy
This has all come today via E-Mail. I had already been in some contact with the ROTC Battalion.
 
"You are going to have to prove you can pass it before the ARMY begins paying for your school anyway, it might as well be now."
APFT now or later, sounds as though you are in. If you can't pass it now you still have to the beginning of Fall 2010 classes to get up to the requirements. Might be a good idea for any ROTC scholarship recipient to take their branches actual PT test (on their own) to see how much needs to be accomplished to actually receive the money for a scholarship.

Congrats OC Josh and good luck!
 
This is actually good. Now they will have kids showing up who can pass the APFT.
This will hopefully reduce the number of kids who drop out their first semester when they find out the Army won't pay their tuition for failure to pass the APFT.

This is a pretty good website too:
http://www.hooah4health.com/4You/apft.htm
 
This is actually good. Now they will have kids showing up who can pass the APFT.
This will hopefully reduce the number of kids who drop out their first semester when they find out the Army won't pay their tuition for failure to pass the APFT.

This is a pretty good website too:
http://www.hooah4health.com/4You/apft.htm

I think so too- I don't really understand why they don't just ask them to do an Army APFT prior to award of the scholarship. While the Army has a few quirks in grading I suppose, but it's pretty basic and could be administered by a gym teacher as well as the Presidential Fitness exam.
 
I'll agree that it is a good idea to know a HS senior can pass the APFT up front.

Perhaps they should make it part of the interview event - do the test with the unit. That is a bit more work for the units to set up (setting up the whole APFT), but it does give the PMS a more complete look at the applicant to see how s/he may fit in with the unit and more opportunity to sell the unit to the applicant.
 
While the Army has a few quirks in grading I suppose, but it's pretty basic and could be administered by a gym teacher as well as the Presidential Fitness exam.
I suppose the scores on the Presidential Fitness exam gives the Army a fairly good idea of who can be expected to pass their APFT. I have no idea how many people they award scholarships to that can't pass in the Fall of their first year, but I'm sure if the number was great they would require passing the APFT before the scholarship award.
 
My son was given the APFT last year as part of his interview process. It really does help the interviewing officer to give a more complete recommendation for the scholarship knowing that the applicant is prepared for ROTC physical fitness training which is a huge part of the program.
 
When my daughter had her interview in 2006 they also gave her the APFT. She was a sprinter on the track team but also a field hockey and soccer player. All the way to the track the PMS and XO bantered back and forth as to whether or not she would pass the run. A little psy ops -:wink:

Bruno - yeah - the reason the Army picked the Presdential fitness test is because phys ed teachers are familiar with the test.
I think they should also be able to give the APFT.
 
Wheaton could have made their "new criteria" known a little bit sooner so that those who got their application in in time to be reviewed by the first review board would have had the APFT done rather than the Presidential. Clearly the scores on the Presidential mean something or the military, by virtue of its own application process, along with the hundreds of other university battalions that do recognize them, wouldn't use them.
 
Received a call today from one of my daughter's AROTC college recruiters informing us that he can only offer half as many 4 year scholarships this year as last (6 instead of 13). He said he just received word from the Army about the reduction and wanted us to know that my daughter was on their list of 6 (although the decision will still be made by the selection board). Supposedly, there have been so many people signing up for AROTC that the Army doesn't need to spend as much money to meet their officer needs.

BTW - Unlike the example above, this unit is basing their decisions on academics and interviews. He mentioned that they (this unit's AROTC officers) felt that with a couple of months of 3x a week PT that they could train cadets to pass the APFT, but that they were not so easily able to train academic performance and study skills.

Thoughts?
 
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Received a call today from one of my daughter's AROTC college recruiters informing us that he can only offer half as many 4 year scholarships this year as last (6 instead of 13). He said he just received word from the Army about the reduction and wanted us to know that my daughter was on their list of 6 (although the decision will still be made by the selection board). Supposedly, there have been so many people signing up for AROTC that the Army doesn't need to spend as much money to meet their officer needs. Any thoughts?

I know that the scholarships were cut in half at one of my son's schools as well. They had told us that a few months ago.
Of course this happens the year our kids are going for it!!
 
there have been so many people signing up for AROTC that the Army doesn't need to spend as much money to meet their officer needs.
more like so many people have signed up the Army doesn't have the money to meet all their scholarship needs.
this unit is basing their decisions on academics and interviews. He mentioned that they (this unit's AROTC officers) felt that with a couple of months of 3x a week PT that they could train cadets to pass the APFT, but that they were not so easily able to train academic performance and study skills.
IMHO, this is true. passing the APFT should not be very difficult for most physically active high school students. Doing very well on it is much harder.

Every year there are kids who can't pass it (even at West Point) - mostly due to laziness IMO. It is still good to know that you will be getting kids who can pass it or are at least in the ball park.
During the first year, failure of the APFT will not incur any committment from the Cadet if he/she is separated. Some will just blow it off and suck up the loss of scholarship. This is unfortunate because they will have deprived someone else of the scholarship.

Think law of supply and demand - when demand increases and supply does not increase the cost rises - expect future Cadets to have to be more competitive in all areas. For the past few years nearly everyone got a scholarship, even if barely qualified. The PMS would take a chance because they needed bodies.
 
He said he just received word from the Army about the reduction and wanted us to know that my daughter was on their list of 6 (although the decision will still be made by the selection board).

I don't understand this. How can a battalion create a list like this when the whole scholarship awardee selection is done centrally? I thought that the cadet command creates a list of potential scholarship awardees based on their scoring system and then further fine tunes the final list for each board based on the input from the local battalion PMSs (if a PMS says, hell no, I guess the candidate will not be awarded a scholarship to that school).

Does the cadet command send a list of all the kids who listed a certain school as one of their 7 choices to the local battalion PMS? I guess if this is the case, the battalion PMSs can create a "preliminary list" of the candidates they like.

However, even if this is the case, there is another issue: not every candidate has has submitted a completed application yet, and SATs and such can still be updated with latest, better scores. How do they know that "these are the six we want this year"?????
 
I don't understand this. How can a battalion create a list like this when the whole scholarship awardee selection is done centrally? I thought that the cadet command creates a list of potential scholarship awardees based on their scoring system and then further fine tunes the final list for each board based on the input from the local battalion PMSs (if a PMS says, hell no, I guess the candidate will not be awarded a scholarship to that school).

Does the cadet command send a list of all the kids who listed a certain school as one of their 7 choices to the local battalion PMS? I guess if this is the case, the battalion PMSs can create a "preliminary list" of the candidates they like.

However, even if this is the case, there is another issue: not every candidate has has submitted a completed application yet, and SATs and such can still be updated with latest, better scores. How do they know that "these are the six we want this year"?????

I would suggest that if a highly competitive battallion has 6 slots and 30 people who have it as their #1, they've got to come up with a list of applicants they will say yes to Cadet Command for or else it will be first come first served as determined by Cadet Command.

This is where interviewing with the battallion and following up with the battallion becomes important for applicants with a clear #1 choice school that is competitive. If a candidate is liked by the battallion and shows continuted interest, the PMS will know that the scholarship won't likely be thrown back for a later board with lesser qualified candidates.
 
I would suggest that if a highly competitive battallion has 6 slots and 30 people who have it as their #1, they've got to come up with a list of applicants they will say yes to Cadet Command for or else it will be first come first served as determined by Cadet Command.
I am not sure how exactly it will work. Even if the battalion had their original 13 scholarships and they had 30 applicants, it is still a question of how they communicate to the Army selection board which 13 applicants they want. Do they only recommend X number via the interview process or do they recommend everybody they want and just wait for the board to determine who will get the scholarships? What happens if the unit is assigned only 6 (or 13) and the board awards 10, does the unit pick which 6 they want?

Obviously I don't have the answers. It is possible that the call was just a "gut check" to see if my daughter was really interested and to make her feel special by being one of the six, but I honestly don't know for sure. I will say that I've now heard from a number of different people that the Army is reducing the total number of scholarships. I don't think their need for officers has decreased, so it must either be that they have found another way to supply those officers, or their budget has been reduced for some unexplained other reason.
 
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