Are all West Pointers, regardless of class rank, performance, anything, commissioned as 0-1 second Lts? Can you graduate as a first Lt. or even a Captain?
Correct ALL academy grads, independent of the actually service academy they went to will graduate as O-1s, aka Butterbars (a term you will tired of quickly). For the Army, Marine Corps and Air Force that is a Second Lieutenant; for the Coast Guard and Navy it is an Ensign.
Everyone graduates as a 2LT. You can find a simplied explanation of promotion criteria at: http://xrl.in/183i I am somewhat surprised/confused/stunned that anyone could even think that any performance analysis could merit a cadet starting at a higher rank in the Army.
Nothing like someone who's all fired up to achieve, gotta appreciate that. Yep, everyone starts at ensign or 2LT. To throw a bone to tallmanonfire, way way way down the road, your class standing at graduation can make the difference in whether you get promoted to the next rank a year ahead of some of your classmates. This is a much-simplified explanation. My experience is Navy, but assuming that it's true for all officers at commissioning, you are given a unique lineal number. You and your commissioning peer group, Academy, ROTC, OCS/OTS, other commissioning sources, will, in general hit various promotion milestones at the same time. There are laws governing how many officers can be at each rank at any one time, so there are occasions when career retention has been good and there are too many officers of a like promotional year hanging out at the time of selection/promotion. They will draw a dotted line at a certain lineal number, and allow those on one side of the number to move forward, and hold the numbers on the other side back a year. So.... way down the road, there might be classmates in the lower part of a USNA class who don't come up for promo at the same time. This occasionally happens to the Marines, since they are a smaller service and have excellent retention. It's not a huge deal, you can always go all the way to 4 stars if you are still on fire! Bottom line... never hurts to try to be the best you can be in any competitive environment, because 2nd and 3rd order consequences are always part of the equation.
