What are your thoughts on the new NCOER and do you think it will help eliminate the so called toxic or out of regulation (overweight) NCO's?

The percentage constraint is supposed to solve the problem of over-inflation of evals but the officer corps has been doing it this way for a while and we still have our issues. Nothing will be perfect as long as humans are doing the writing.

A good strategy is to ensure that 'taking care of NCO business' does not evolve into repeatedly covering up problems. I've seen problem children shielded by their first line leader and when they got their stripes turned into horrible NCOs. This is usually followed by a CSM asking if you are trying to ruin their career when you mention poor performance or other issue in an eval. Sometimes we need to ensure that someone gets their just desserts in order to straighten them out or put them out.

I hope it does, but if one can fudge numbers now, one can fudge the narrative format of the new NCOER. I think the only way to really put things in place is to have the scores on the NCOER.

The senior rater block check is revolutionary, as it is constrained to 24%. While a better evaluation doesn't directly produce better NCOs, at least now only 24% in a senior raters profile will get a top block, versus the historic rate of more than 90%. Fat NCOs who fail the APFT (or come close) aren't going to get top blocks.

I do like the idea of actually putting the APFT score on the eval, as a mandatory entry. I also think we should put height and weight and body fat% on the eval. It seems not many agree with these ideas, which confuses me. But I also think that the APFT standard is 180 and passing, so we should feel comfortable with someone who meets the standard. Thus, 181 would be an exceeds the standard performance, and higher scores would simply indicate higher performance.

Paradoxically, the new eval might increase the number of toxic NCOs; people are now going to compete for top blocks, and I'd guess this competition won't always be healthy. Lots of politicking and backstabbing can be expected.

Our peers know who among us are top performers. This sometimes isn't as clear to raters and senior raters.

One last note: for NCO evaluations, timing is now as or more important than performance and potential. Too bad if you're a superstar with a senior rater who has a small profile, no top block for you. Just arrived to the job and your senior raters profile is tapped out (because he used his silver bullet to give the last guy a top block)? No top block for you for the duration of your assignment. These sorts of things are realities that I'm not sure the NCO Corps has grasped. This will be worse than it is for officers---our senior raters are only constrained to giving top blocks to less than 49% of their populations.

It'll take a few years of promotion boards with the new NCOER for enough data to exist to understand the impact of the new NCOER. I'd expect that the data will show that only NCOs with straight ttop block NCOERs will get promoted. 24% is a very low number. But we will also likely see even folks with straight top blocks not get promoted, because we are a shrinking Army and senior NCO promotion rates aren't even as high as 24%. There will also be outliers---every board will promote NCOs with no top blocks, with derogatory info in their file, simply based on the requirement to have a certain number of folks in a certain MOS at a certain rank.

We should also expect a shift to a pooling concept, where senior raters are located at echelons above reality so that small populations don't exist. Say, platoon sergeants being rated by brigade or division, squad leaders being senior rated by battalion, E-8s by three and four stars, etc. this is what it is like, sometimes, for officers, where often the chain of command does not in any way align with he rating scheme.

Finally, we should expect an exponential increase in late NCOERs, as senior raters game the system to save top blocks for certain folks, and as HRC will, initially at least, be overwhelmed by the new NCOER process.