I love and hate it.

For one, I love that it is, as MSG Cunningham stated, performance based moreso than how it once was. But its still an honors system, and while competitive, its prone to the "I like this guy more than this guy" when it comes to breaking down AFSC's into percentage brackets of who gets what score. You can ALWAYS spruce up someones performance on paper even if they are a POS.

I'm also upset they are taking away Time in Grade points. What this means is that now a brand new staff sergeant has the same chance as a 6 year staff sergeant to make rank, assuming all other factors are the same. Meaning, still, whomever can test "better" on a paper test will get rank, which means its NO DIFFERENT. All it does is make it so that people who suck at testing, or are in highly competitive or smaller career fields can find themselves out for failing to progress.

I can see what our leadership is trying to do, but I think they could have done it better. But only time will tell... I'll give it a chance. I do like that everyone's performance reports are at the same time now, though.

To eliminate the effects of inflation, the Marines started grading the graders.  

If a reporting senior is a Santa Claus and always gives high marks to all his people so that they can get promoted more quickly, what ends up happening is that the range of the reporting senior's marks becomes a very narrow band, which doesn't do a good job of breaking out the top and bottom performers. The reporting senior's high marks will be adjusted lower so that they fall in line with the average score given by all the reporting seniors, and his top and bottom performers will look like everyone else that's average.

Conversely, if a grader is exceptionally hard on everyone, that too will be taken into account and his low marks will be adjusted up by a factor that puts them on equal footing with the average of the other reporting seniors.  

Reporting seniors are consequently judged according to how well they grade and so it isn't in their interest to be hard or soft, but rather to be fair.  

Average people should be graded average and an average mark on a fitrep should not be the kiss of death.  Reporting seniors must be able to justify in the narrative the reason for grading the way they did.

The USMC's system of FITREPS for SNCO's and Officers makes a lot of sense. The only problem I see with it is that a unit with a lot of high performers will be made to look the same as a unit with a lot of low performers, because the evaluation marks are standardized to some extent across different units. I think that such problems are almost inevitable however when dealing with promotions in an organization of such size. The board making the decision will not be intimately familiar with all candidates, and must rely on a sometimes imperfect reporting system. The new system for the Air Force appears to be a step in the same direction, and should help eliminate some of this "score inflation."