West Point Admissions & Data Insights
This is a minor observation, but we’d like to help West Point keep its standards high. The admissions website is out of date. The “meet our cadets” section on the site (Link), as shown below, accessed recently, should be retitled “Meet our grads,” or be updated to show actual cadets and cadet video introductions. Ryan … Read more
West Point G5 has made great strides in data transparency. We noted this in the last post, but we have saved the best for last! The G5 Institutional Research site also has a link tantalizingly named “Graduation, Commissioning, and Retention rates.” We visited it hoping to find detailed breakdowns of graduation rates and separation rates … Read more
West Point has launched some new data offerings on their site. These exceed the previous “class profiles” that passed as the best readily-available public information. Now there are newer, better datasets available at the G5 page. We get comprehensive class characteristics on all the application elements — test scores, qualifications, race, athletics, prior service… We … Read more
“This commitment to excellence must permeate everything we do. I will not compromise my decision to advocate winning in accordance with our values of duty, honor and country…. I have great concern being called a liar after more than 42 years of honorable service to our Nation and many years serving here at West Point.” … Read more
Score one for the skeptics. In our previous posts we’ve used aptitude testing as a proxy for performance and the gold standard of what West Point recruiting efforts ought to be focused on. As it turns out, military scores matter more for “succeeding” in today’s Army. But is that a good thing? Our opinion is … Read more
“Wow, it must have been hard to get in there.” We’ve gotten that a lot when acquaintances find out that we attended USMA. Other grads probably get it too. West Point is often described as “highly selective.” But how hard was it? How selective–or perhaps “elite” is a better word — is West Point? Falsely … Read more
The post on Why There Are So Few Women at West Point raised our interest in a topic: What would the composition of West Point look like if candidates were admitted and attended based on rank order of candidate scores? Given our previous findings, they would almost certainly look very different than they do now. … Read more
Yesterday we happened on Colonel (Ret) Ellen Haring‘s article “Why Are There So Few Women at West Point? Ask Congress,” in which Haring makes a number of gender-advocacy claims and proposals regarding the number of women in the military. The full referenced report is here. We summarize Col Haring’s major points as: Women are too … Read more
A record number of African American women recently graduated from West Point, the United States Military Academy in New York. This was lauded as a historical accomplishment in many major news venues: Black women are set to make military history on Saturday, as the West Point military academy graduates its class of 2019 with its highest-ever … Read more
The previous posts have been most edifying to put together, but we’ve been a bit short on time lately to build on them. There is additional analysis that can be done on activities (in particular, deeper dives into test and GPA by corps squad teams, analyzing the extent of test score advantages for various groups, … Read more