How to Fill Out USAF OTS Form 2: Sections, Gates, and Grading

USAF OTS Form 2, officially the Holm Center Leadership Competency Evaluation, is a one-page rubric an instructor uses to grade how you perform as the designated leader during a graded exercise at Officer Training School. It is not an application or a pre-screening document. It scores ten leadership competencies, a four-step decision analysis, and whether your team completed the mission, and those scores feed directly into your qualification rating and order of merit.¹

Who Fills It Out and When You See It

An instructor or designated evaluator completes the form, not you. After a graded leadership exercise, the evaluator records scores across three sections and writes comments explaining them. You review the form during a feedback session and initial it to confirm you have read the evaluation. Initialing is not agreement. If you believe the assessment misrepresents your performance, you can attach a written response.¹

The top of the form captures your name, squadron and flight, the evaluator’s name, the specific exercise, and the date. Everything below that is the evaluator’s judgment about you as the leader during that exercise.

The Two Pass/Fail Gates

Before any scored items, the form has two mandatory yes-or-no requirements. You must have clearly recognized the mission or objective, and you must have maintained command of your team members throughout the exercise. A “no” on either one is a serious problem regardless of what happens in the scored sections below.¹

Section A: Leadership Competencies

Section A has ten items, each rated on a 1-to-5 scale, for a maximum of 50 points. Each item describes a specific behavior evaluators are watching for:

Trust and commitment: whether your words and actions built confidence in the team.
Delegation: whether you delegated authority appropriately without abandoning command responsibility.
Accountability: whether you owned your team’s performance and your own actions.
Flexibility: whether you adapted when conditions or plans changed.
Military bearing: whether you kept self-discipline, self-control, and composure under pressure.
Clear communication: whether you articulated ideas and intent your team could act on.
Open communication: whether you encouraged feedback and kept information moving.
Motivation: whether you inspired the team to push through difficulty and take calculated risks to accomplish the objective.
Focus and intensity: whether you stayed locked on the mission without drifting.
Team development: whether you built cohesion, confidence, and cooperation among team members.

Section B: Decision Analysis

Section B uses the OODA loop, with each of the four phases (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) rated 1 to 5, for a maximum of 20 points. Evaluators are looking at whether you correctly identified the problem, gathered relevant information, tested potential solutions against realistic criteria, set a plan in motion, and adjusted course when circumstances changed.¹

Section C: Mission Completion

A simple yes or no: did your team accomplish the objective? Strong leadership scores with a failed mission, or a completed mission with weak leadership scores, both tell the evaluator something about your development.

How the Overall Grade Is Assigned

Sections A and B combine for a scored maximum of 70 points. Section C’s yes/no folds into the overall grade, which maps to five bands:

Outstanding: above 65
High-Satisfactory: 54 to 64
Satisfactory: 38 to 53
Marginal: 26 to 37
Unsatisfactory: below 26

Reaching Outstanding requires consistently high marks across almost every item.¹ The instructor comments at the bottom of the form are where evaluators explain what drove the scores, and that is the part worth reading closely, because it tells you what to change before your next graded exercise.

When Form 2 Is Used at OTS

OTS is an 8.5-week program at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, built across five modules of progressively harder leadership challenges.² You will be graded with Form 2 during several types of exercises:

Leadership Reaction Course: scenario-based missions where you lead a team through a problem-solving environment. You go through multiple iterations across the program.³
Mission Command Experience: a simulation of an uncertain, rapidly changing environment covering planning, briefing, execution, and debrief. You must pass an MCE to graduate, and a failure triggers a Commander’s Review.³
Leadership Experience: additional graded opportunities to apply the same competencies in different settings.

How Your Scores Affect Your Standing

OTS assigns every trainee a Qualification Rating that summarizes overall fitness for commissioning:

Q1: qualified at the basic or intermediate competency level, suitable for continued growth as a company grade officer.
Q2: satisfactorily qualified with several areas needing improvement, but attitude and effort align with Air Force values, and the trainee is progressing rather than regressing.
Q3: did not demonstrate the appropriate aptitude at the required competency level. A Q3 can lead to disenrollment.

Form 2 results from your graded exercises feed into that rating.⁴

If you are competing for Distinguished Graduate honors, Form 2 scores matter even more. The order of merit that determines the top 10 percent of each class pulls from flight commander assessments, peer assessments, Mission Command Experiences, physical fitness, academics, briefing assessments, memo writing, and dorm and uniform inspections.³ Strong Form 2 evaluations during the LRC and MCE feed the leadership component of that ranking directly.

Reading a Marginal or Low Score

A “Marginal” score in week two does not end your OTS career. The staff expects growth over time, and the Q2 qualification rating explicitly accounts for trainees who are progressing. The trajectory that becomes dangerous is a pattern of low scores with no visible improvement, because that points toward Q3 and a potential disenrollment review. Use the instructor comments as a development tool, and if you disagree with something specific and material, use your right to attach a written statement rather than letting the record stand unchallenged.¹

A Note on the AFROTC Version

If you are searching for Form 2 as an Air Force ROTC cadet rather than an OTS trainee, be aware that AFROTC detachments use a modified version of the form during Leadership Laboratory. It covers similar competency areas but scores each sub-area as +1, 0, or −1, with an overall passing threshold of an OLA Competency Score of +1 or higher, and it adds a strictly pass/fail “Leader of Character” section where failing any of three character areas fails the whole assessment.⁵ The point-scale rubric described above is the OTS version.

1
Holm Center. Holm Center Form 2 – Leadership Competency Evaluation
2
U.S. Air Force. Officer Training School (OTS)
3
Air Force Accessions Center. Officer Training School Syllabus
4
Air Force Accessions Center. Officer Training School
5
University of Southern Mississippi. AFROTCI 36-2011, Vol 1, Cadet’s Guide to Leadership Laboratory Curriculum