Reliability; Test Validity IDENTIFIERS *Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery

In the late 1970s, the Department of Defense requested that the reference population for the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) be changed and updated to reflect the current you, 1 population. Analyses of new data collected in 1980 indicated that speeded subtest scores of the new sample were atypically low and that the sample might therefore be inappropriate for use as a reference. A preliminary investigation traced the problem to a nonoperational answer sheet used for data collection of the 1980 youth sample. The present project was designed as a large-scale test of the differences between these nonoperational answer sheets and the operational answer sheets. Data were collected on the two speeded subtests from about 9,500 service applicants at Military Entrance Processing Stations; half used operational and half used nonoperational answer sheets that were employed in the yout