The United States Navy recently revamped its officer fitness report system. Under the old system, officers were ranked into one of four categories, where 4.0 was the highest grade. This old system had been used for 20 years and grade inflation had become rampant. Eighty percent of all sailors routinely were ranked a perfect 4.0. One officer remarked, “Let’s face it, 85 percent of the people are 4.0 and 80 percent [of those] have every mark in 4.0.” A retired admiral commented, “The old system wasn’t entirely broke, it was just deteriorating over time and became less and less useful.”

The Navy decided to change the evaluation system because of the natural tendency for senior officers to promote their own subordinates over unknown sailors. Not everyone deserved a 4.0, but to get their own people promoted, senior officers had to play along because that’s what everyone else was doing.

The new system requires each officer to be rated on a 1 – 5 scale in seven areas: professional expertise, leadership, support for equal opportunity programs, military bearing and appearance, teamwork, mission accomplishment, and interpersonal skills. The total points out of 35 possible are then used to provide an overall promotion recommendation:

• Clearly promote.

• Must promote.

• Promotable.

• Progressing.

• Don’t promote

The number of ratings in the top two categories — “clearly promote” and “must promote” — will be severely restricted to at most 20 percent of the evaluations. If an officer is evaluating 10 junior officers, at the most only two can receive the top two ratings.

What are the expected consequences of this new system? What are the likely outcomes? What are the pros and cons of the new system?