Opinion ID: 2980714
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Base Score Calculation

Text: To begin, Baldwin’s base score was not incorrectly calculated. She raises three reasons why it was, and we address these in turn.4 First, Baldwin claims she was entitled to five additional points for a Management Leadership Training Course. During her deposition, she identified the course as “EEO training 2000.” Hardly a unique qualification, “EEO training 2000” is a class required of all pre-2000 Air Force employees and one for which neither she nor Heckler received credit. Had Baldwin received credit for this course, Heckler would have as well; accordingly, Corcoran’s failure to award Baldwin the challenged five points had no detrimental affect on her candidacy. 4 Though she claimed the precipitant of her EEO filing was Corcoran’s failure to credit her master’s degree and professional military education, she clearly received the prescribed twenty points for her master’s degree in elementary education, plus an additional ten points for her training at Air Command and Staff College. Baldwin does not challenge this point allocation on appeal. 7 Baldwin next alleges she was denied five points for a Finance and Budget course she completed. She does not dispute that the score sheets limited credit for this and similar courses to those taken within the last ten years. Nevertheless, she has identified only classes taken in the 1980s. Clearly, her purported qualification falls outside of the category parameters and Corcoran did not wrongly deny her credit for it. Baldwin argues that discrimination can be subtle, and intimated that we might infer it from the fact that the relevant ten-year limitation was added in Corcoran’s handwriting, rather than preprinted on the score sheets themselves. While such an annotation may be troubling in a different context, it had no discriminatory effect in this case. First, it was written on both candidates’ score sheets. Second, Baldwin has not alleged that the restrictions had a disparate impact on her and Heckler’s candidacy, such as by showing that unlike Baldwin, Heckler had not taken any of the listed classes within the last ten years. Third, Baldwin’s argument is a double-edged sword. Baldwin earned five points for her relevant experience as a GS-12 in a category limited, but for Corcoran’s handwritten addition of “or GS-12,” to candidates (such as Heckler) who had previously served as a GS-13. Finally, Baldwin claims she was entitled to one point for each of two performance awards she earned in 1986 and 1989. Like her Finance and Budget course, however, Baldwin’s awards are simply too dated to have warranted credit on her GS-13 job application. Baldwin does not contest that the printed portion of the score sheet expressly limits credit to awards earned within the five years prior to application, yet claims she is entitled to points for awards earned more than three times that long ago. These two notions oppose each other, and Corcoran was again correct to withhold the relevant points from Baldwin’s score. 8