West Point Admissions & Data Insights
We saw a while ago that John T Reed gave us a nice mention on his military articles blog. High Praise – Thanks John! I just learned of an important blog about my undergraduate alma mater West Point. It is called https://usmadata.com/..A more complete title might be.• The Unofficial Web Site of the United States Military … Read more
In our recent post “Call for Sunlight…”, we outlined West Point branch selection and which groups went into which Army branches to put context around USMA’s stated need for preferences in admissions. We speculated that cadet branching preferences are one driver of the low number of minorities in combat arms. In this post, we find … Read more
“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Brandeis, L. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote in his 1913 article “What Publicity Can Do” that “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” discussed here and often cited by proponents of transparency in government. He was referring, apparently, to “the wickedness of people shielding … Read more
We received a contact-form message from West Point’s Intellectual Property Attorney informing us that our use of the West Point Crest on this website is (now “was”, as we have modified our site) unlawful. Excellent work making the correction! We applaud the Army’s scrupulous protection of our rule of law by spending the time and … Read more
In yesterday’s post we saw that 6 cadets were involved in the Florida cocaine/fentanyl event. This got us wondering. How likely was it that the football players “just happened to be involved” in the issue? In other words, how what was the probability that this was an event with randomly selected cadets? Method To this … Read more
On March 11, several cadets were involved in a party where they ingested cocaine laced with fentanyl. Several of the cadets ended up in the hospital. The Superintendent, Darryl Williams, sent this out on March 14th: March 14, 2022 Members of the Long Gray Line, As many of you know, the United States Military Academy … Read more
In our earlier post “WCS Doesn’t Matter for Athletes & Minorities” we found out that the Whole Candidate Score is bypassed for certain preferred categories of applicant. In this post, we explore its impact. Specifically we try to answer the questions: What would a class built solely on the Whole Candidate Score look like? How … Read more
We recently found some interesting discussions on the Service Academy Forums [Link]. The topics discussed were about whether being a White applicant puts one at a disadvantage and why some of the West Point classes had SAT scores under 500. Well, these topics have been addressed extensively and quantitatively on these pages ( spoiler: 1) … 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