Lawrence M. Hanser

Other authors have reviewed the history of the misnorming of the Armed Serv-
ices Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) that occurred in the late 1970s. One
outgrowth of the misnorming was a requirement for the military services to
demonstrate the validity of ASVAB as a device for screening service applicants.
Do those who perform better on ASVAB actually make better soldiers, sailors,
and airmen?

Rather than seeing this as a burden of proof required to justify then-current
practices, the U.S. Army's deputy chief of staff for personnel and the leadership
at the U.S. Army Research Institute (U.S. ARI) for the Behavioral and Social
Sciences saw it as an opportunity to undertake research that would advance the
army's techniques for selecting and assigning young men and women. This was
the fall of 1980. The research program that encompassed the army-sponsored
efforts to validate and expand military personnel selection and classification
techniques came to be called simply "Project A."

I joined the Army Research Institute in January 1981. During a brief previous
visit in fall 1980, I had the occasion to attend a briefing given by Milt Maier
on the misnorming of the ASVAB. At that time, I did not realize that the focus
of my eight years at ARI would be on validating and extending ASVAB.

My first assignment was to travel to Panama on a little-known and largely
undocumented pilot project for Project A. During that trip, we administered
surveys to a number of combat soldiers and pored over personnel records to
uncover any information about their performance that could be reasonably used

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