QUALIFICATION DESIGN

For many in the profession of arms, the term "Qualification" may as well be a four-letter word, and based on an observational study I've been conducting for 20-plus years, most of them are not wrong. The qualification they are subjected to is either too easy, too hard, comes with too much logistical strain, is too short, is too long, uses too much ammo, doesn't use enough ammo, emphasizes the wrong skills, techniques, or tactics….etc, etc, etc, until the entire topic becomes so mired in minutiae that getting any two people to agree on "what it should be" becomes the equivalent of an emotional one-rep max.

How should we even approach the problem of developing a qualification? Before we even begin the arguments over what techniques, what distances, what times, what target size, how much ammo, etc. — we first MUST understand the foundationalist approach to the problem that a given qualification is even trying to solve. Plotting an organizational skill level across many individuals and reading the distribution that results.

Being the philosophy nerd that I am, I'm going to start from the "a priori" position on the subject and put the neighing horses back in the barn until we can build a track for them to run on.

Here's the topic of this first installment: "Designing the Standard that Holds," i.e., how to look at performance on a spectrum in order to understand the cause and effect of a qualification on both an individual and an organization.

Ask yourself this: Can you identify, right now, which point on the performance spectrum your minimum passing score sits on — and can you defend that choice with something other than tradition or consensus?