All BNCOC graduates to get 40 promotion points

by Staff Sgt. Marcia Triggs

WASHINGTON (Army News Service, July 30, 2002) -- Soldiers who

successfully complete the Basic Noncommissioned Officer Course will be

awarded 40 promotion points beginning Aug. 1.

Soldiers will no longer receive four promotion points per BNCOC-course week. This change will lessen administrative mistakes and level the playing field for BNCOC graduates with similar military occupational specialties, personnel officials said.

"Clerks will no longer have to do the math," said Sgt. Major Louisa Scott, the chief of Enlisted Promotions, Total U.S. Army Personnel Command. Under the current system, when soldiers complete both phases of BNCOC -- common core and military occupational specialty specific -- they submit two forms of the Department of the Army 1059 to their Personnel Support Branch for points, Scott said.

Then the PSB clerk decides on her own how many points a soldier gets, Scott said. For example, if phase one is five weeks and three days and phase two is two weeks and two days one clerk may give 32 points for eight weeks, but another clerk may give 28 points for seven weeks.  By implementing a 40-point standard there's no room for interpretation, Scott said.

Some soldiers may have the perception that they are going to lose points because their particular BNCOC is longer than 10 weeks, said Sgt. Major Gerald Purcell, personnel policy integrator with the Army's G1.

"That's not true. The point system will be applicable to every soldier in the MOS, and the cut-off score will reflect that," he said. Soldiers will still be competing against others in their MOS, and everyone in that MOS will have 40 points, Scott added.

The soldiers most greatly affected are ones who are in MOSs that have merged, such as some in the medical field, and those that are planning to merge under the implementation of ADS XXI initiatives, which was designed to consolidate MOSs with similar functions, Purcell said.

Last year several medical skills were combined under the umbrella 91W. After the merge, some soldiers had promotion points based on a 12-week BNCOC course while others had points based on an eight-week course. Other potential merges include personnel administrative specialists (75B) and personnel services specialists (75H) who would be renamed as 42A.

It's also been proposed to merge light-wheel vehicle mechanics (63B), heavy-wheel vehicle mechanics (63S) and wheel-vehicle repairers (63W). While the wheel-vehicle repairers would lose 32 points if the merger goes through, each of the soldiers, who would be competing between one another for promotion, would receive the same number of promotion points for BNCOC completion. This eliminates inequities based solely on their BNCOC course length, Purcell said.

"We're treating BNCOC as an equal element. So as we merge similar MOSs, no one is at a disadvantage," Purcell said.

In July all Personnel Support Battalions began converting the BNCOC points, and adjusting promotion points. Soldiers will not have to do anything, Purcell said.