Don
The thing that puts a user directly into an assigned privilege level is aaa authorization. And Cisco specifically made authorization not enabled on the console by default. The reason for this is that if authorization is not set up correctly you can lock yourself out of the box and Cisco wants to help make sure that you still have console access if there are problems in authorization.
You can enable authorization on the console using this command:
aaa authorization console
You can use this command to have users who login on the console put directly into a privilege level - but be sure that authorization is really set up correctly.
See this link for more details:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/docs/ios/12_2/security/command/reference/srfauth.html#wp1024046
HTH
Rick
HTH
Rick