The Army is rolling out new Academic Evaluation Report forms to gauge soldiers’ performance in military and civilian schools — an initiative that will ultimately help the service better manage talent.

Eventually, the forms, which were approved this week by former Secretary of the Army Mark Esper, will be included into a database that Army leaders can use to search for soldiers who have specific skills and knowledge areas outside of their MOS.

For instance, if a soldier attends a school and writes a thesis on subterranean warfare, keywords or word strings associated with that thesis will be searchable in the database. When the Army wants experts on that topic, the revamped forms and database will help them find that talent.

The system will help the Army look for soldiers who have completed "a paper or development research ... during a course that the Army finds a priority or need to tap into,” Jeff Gates, a policy analyst at Army Human Resources Command, said in an interview.

Improvements to the process will be implemented in phases, but all schools are required to use the new forms by Sept. 1, according to an Army press release.

Gates said the changes are necessary because the older forms that were used previously are more than 50 years old at this point.

“It really only provided that an individual attended a school and passed,” he said. “There was no visibility of a soldier’s outstanding performance in an academic setting.”

Army senior leaders asked Human Resources Command to revamp the forms so that they will better track soldiers’ academic performance in military and civilian schools, identify top performers and increase student accountability.

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The new evaluation reports, titled Form 1059s, will come in three separate versions for service schools; civilian institutions; and one to be used solely by the Army War College, the Command and General Staff College and Senior Service Colleges.

The changes will impact officers and enlisted alike, Gates said. Advanced Leader Course, Senior Leader Course and the Sergeants Major Academy will use the new form system for enlisted soldiers, for instance.

“The goal of all these changes are to make sure the Army puts all the right soldiers in the right positions at the right time,” Gates said.

Soldiers attending civilian schools as part of their Army duties will also use the new forms, which will rank students based on their class standing even when attending classes with civilians.

One significant change is the new forms now recognize “superior academic achievement” for soldiers who place within the top 21 to 40 percent of their class, according to Gates.

“The new forms are designed to capture their overall grade point average,” Gates said. “So in that aspect, yes, they’ll be assessed on how well they do against the standards of that course.”

HRC will host training for school administrators, course managers and instructors on how to use the new system beginning July 15.

Kyle Rempfer was an editor and reporter who has covered combat operations, criminal cases, foreign military assistance and training accidents. Before entering journalism, Kyle served in U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and deployed in 2014 to Paktika Province, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq.

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