If you want to be a contender you need all 10's on your Interview sheets and to go number 1 in the rankings. Chiefs should not be ranking you for an officers package. Just my opinion. Remember the board is looking at hundreds of applicants. Sometimes one 9, or a lower ranking than other people in your command may keep you from getting a good look at your package, no pun intended. Just keep doing interviews until you get what you want. Hope this helps. FY-08 pilot select.
Was this added in an offhand manner to qualify the crap you just spit out, or did you just feel that you needed to remind someone that for some reason you think you know what you are talking about?
I too am an FY08 Pilot Select, even though I had a 9 on one of my officer interviews. The packages are scored by a group of people (LCDR's usually) using a pre-determined scoring system for most things like awards, evals, education, etc. The rest of the package is looked at later by another group that scores the rest of the package and makes the selections (this information can be found elsewere on this site).
Big picture, the board considers the overall person, not just certain aspects of the package. Therefore, it is possible to be a "contender" even if you may not have smoked your boards. There are a number of reasons for having the Chief's mess rank applicants, some make sense and some don't. If the case happens to be the Skipper was new, or just busy, then the Chief's mess would probably have the best idea of a particular applicant's strengths and weaknesses. Could this lead to some skewed rankings? Sure it could...but not likely. Chief's are charged with training junior officers and by default should have a pretty good idea of who would make a good one.
