28 June 2011

The Defense Language Aptitude Battery, or DLAB

My Test Results
After another long night at the hotel and an early drive to MEPS, I took the DLAB, a 1.5-hour long test of gibberish and pictures, at 0730. The DLAB assesses a prospective linguist's potential to learn a foreign language.

The best score on the DLAB is a 176. There are 4 language categories one may qualify for (required scores in parentheses):

Cat. I (95): French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish
Cat. II (100): German
Cat. III (105): Dari, Hebrew, Hindi, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek
Cat. IV (110): Arabic, Pashto, Chinese, Japanese, Korean

I scored a 146, qualifying me for a Cat. IV language. Although I would love to learn Korean or Japanese, ultimately it is the Army that will decide which language I am assigned to learn for one year during my advanced individual training (AIT) at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, CA.

Today was my second-to-last visit to MEPS. The final trip will be before I head to the airport to report to basic training.

No comments:

Post a Comment