Comparison of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery to the General Aptitude Test Battery

A statistical comparison of two test batteries, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery ASVAB and the General Aptitude Battery GATB, is presented. The comparison is based on a sample that is predominantly male and white. Four different analyses were carried out and are reported here. The first analysis described the sample and its performance on the subtests and the composites of the GATB and the subtests and Department of Defense Student Testing Program composites of the ASVAB. The second analysis investigated the extent to which the ASVAB can predict GATB subtests and composites, and vice versa. The third analysis was a canonical correlation of the subtests of the two batteries. The fourth analysis consisted of principal components factor analyses of the two batteries, both separately and combined. Results showed that the batteries do not overlap enough to be considered equivalent or interchangeable, but that they do share a large amount of variance. Such shared variance is to be expected in batteries which have been developed for occupational selection or guidance for similar populations. Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery ASVAB, General Aptitude Test Battery GATB, Tests.