Rigor at TJ compared to regular FCPS high Schools

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:LOL. You are clearly delusional. TJ senior class has 345 students (out of abojt 430 senior class size) who are National merit semi finalists or commended. 165 are semi finalists and 180 commended. You can’t achieve these honors simply with test prep.

You will see a significant drop with the class of 2025 (first year under new admissions system). I have a child admitted under the new system who probably wouldn’t have applied under the old system and they even see the difference in the kids admitted now and the impression is not smarter nor naturally more intelligent.

Fwiw, there's a point where bringing together the best of the best is no longer beneficial for anyone - and TJ was at that point, was passed that point.

That’s a good argument for returning TJ to use as a community school and abandoning the false pretense that it still attracts the region’s best students.

No, there isn’t. The school is not built to serve as a community school. It would require a significant amount of retrofitting to the existing building plot and would almost certainly decimate Annandale and Edison.

This is a fever dream that for some idiot reason won’t die on these boards. TJ is going to continue being what it is because it cannot be anything else.

The school was built as a community school. Returning it to that use would not decimate Annandale and Edison if there were other boundary changes.

But the idiots will keep claiming TJ is special when it’s now just mostly an escape hatch from the lower-tier schools rather than anything truly unique justifying the constant drama.

Nonsense. Just making things up now?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:LOL. You are clearly delusional. TJ senior class has 345 students (out of abojt 430 senior class size) who are National merit semi finalists or commended. 165 are semi finalists and 180 commended. You can’t achieve these honors simply with test prep.

You will see a significant drop with the class of 2025 (first year under new admissions system). I have a child admitted under the new system who probably wouldn’t have applied under the old system and they even see the difference in the kids admitted now and the impression is not smarter nor naturally more intelligent.

Fwiw, there's a point where bringing together the best of the best is no longer beneficial for anyone - and TJ was at that point, was passed that point.

That’s a good argument for returning TJ to use as a community school and abandoning the false pretense that it still attracts the region’s best students.

No, there isn’t. The school is not built to serve as a community school. It would require a significant amount of retrofitting to the existing building plot and would almost certainly decimate Annandale and Edison.

This is a fever dream that for some idiot reason won’t die on these boards. TJ is going to continue being what it is because it cannot be anything else.

The school was built as a community school. Returning it to that use would not decimate Annandale and Edison if there were other boundary changes.

But the idiots will keep claiming TJ is special when it’s now just mostly an escape hatch from the lower-tier schools rather than anything truly unique justifying the constant drama.

Of course it was built as a community school. That building would have worked relatively easily if FCPS decided to revert it to community school use.

But the building was renovated in the middle part of the last decade at a taxpayer expense of over $100M to create what it is today. The cafeteria is so small that you’d have to either have literally ten lunch periods or hire an extraordinary amount of extra security to police the hallways during lunch time (yes, you can allow students to eat anywhere in the building when 100% of them are focused on academics). The entire research lab wing is purpose built for just that - research. And they’re filled with literally tens of millions worth of specialized equipment that is mostly privately financed. Most of the non-STEM classrooms are too small to accommodate what would be a normal class size for a community school. And that’s just the beginning of it.

Like it or not, TJ is special. And while a lot of people want to knock it down because they’ve got sour grapes about who is going there now (like all of the new low-income Asian students), the kids there are still thriving and still producing exceptional outcomes and results.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:LOL. You are clearly delusional. TJ senior class has 345 students (out of abojt 430 senior class size) who are National merit semi finalists or commended. 165 are semi finalists and 180 commended. You can’t achieve these honors simply with test prep.

You will see a significant drop with the class of 2025 (first year under new admissions system). I have a child admitted under the new system who probably wouldn’t have applied under the old system and they even see the difference in the kids admitted now and the impression is not smarter nor naturally more intelligent.

Fwiw, there's a point where bringing together the best of the best is no longer beneficial for anyone - and TJ was at that point, was passed that point.

That’s a good argument for returning TJ to use as a community school and abandoning the false pretense that it still attracts the region’s best students.

No, there isn’t. The school is not built to serve as a community school. It would require a significant amount of retrofitting to the existing building plot and would almost certainly decimate Annandale and Edison.

This is a fever dream that for some idiot reason won’t die on these boards. TJ is going to continue being what it is because it cannot be anything else.

The school was built as a community school. Returning it to that use would not decimate Annandale and Edison if there were other boundary changes.

But the idiots will keep claiming TJ is special when it’s now just mostly an escape hatch from the lower-tier schools rather than anything truly unique justifying the constant drama.

1) TJ is not “mostly an escape hatch from
the lower-tier schools”. An extremely generous estimate would be that maybe 20% of incoming students are coming from schools that you callously refer to as “lower-tier” - but they’re high-performing students from those schools rather than the 75th kid from Carson or the 58th kid from Rocky Run.

2) The “constant drama” that you refer to is generated by a small group of pests who are butthurt about the admissions process and are constantly seeking any angle they can to drum up bad press about the school. It was around this time last year that the National Merit issue captured the imaginations of Klanned Karenhood members everywhere because TJ and a few other schools were a bit late in distributing an award that has essentially zero value. But the story didn’t drop until the Winter Vacation - it literally hit on the day that FCPS employees left for the break.

If you’re sick of the drama, tell the people causing it to cut it out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:LOL. You are clearly delusional. TJ senior class has 345 students (out of abojt 430 senior class size) who are National merit semi finalists or commended. 165 are semi finalists and 180 commended. You can’t achieve these honors simply with test prep.

You will see a significant drop with the class of 2025 (first year under new admissions system). I have a child admitted under the new system who probably wouldn’t have applied under the old system and they even see the difference in the kids admitted now and the impression is not smarter nor naturally more intelligent.

Fwiw, there's a point where bringing together the best of the best is no longer beneficial for anyone - and TJ was at that point, was passed that point.

That’s a good argument for returning TJ to use as a community school and abandoning the false pretense that it still attracts the region’s best students.

No, there isn’t. The school is not built to serve as a community school. It would require a significant amount of retrofitting to the existing building plot and would almost certainly decimate Annandale and Edison.

This is a fever dream that for some idiot reason won’t die on these boards. TJ is going to continue being what it is because it cannot be anything else.

The school was built as a community school. Returning it to that use would not decimate Annandale and Edison if there were other boundary changes.

But the idiots will keep claiming TJ is special when it’s now just mostly an escape hatch from the lower-tier schools rather than anything truly unique justifying the constant drama.

1) TJ is not “mostly an escape hatch from
the lower-tier schools”. An extremely generous estimate would be that maybe 20% of incoming students are coming from schools that you callously refer to as “lower-tier” - but they’re high-performing students from those schools rather than the 75th kid from Carson or the 58th kid from Rocky Run.

2) The “constant drama” that you refer to is generated by a small group of pests who are butthurt about the admissions process and are constantly seeking any angle they can to drum up bad press about the school. It was around this time last year that the National Merit issue captured the imaginations of Klanned Karenhood members everywhere because TJ and a few other schools were a bit late in distributing an award that has essentially zero value. But the story didn’t drop until the Winter Vacation - it literally hit on the day that FCPS employees left for the break.

If you’re sick of the drama, tell the people causing it to cut it out.

Best post I've read all week!

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Bottom 10% at TJ will be top 10% at Langley and McLean etc.

Bottom 10% at TJ get a B or C in Calc AB, and that's about it with math. Top 10% at Langley and McLean get an A in Calc BC, and follow it up with Multi Variable, and Linear Alegbra

More so now with the essay based admission. Bottom 10% leave after freshman, the next bottom 10% write five line essays and that's about it

Just the opposite. The bottom 10% was worse when people were only getting in because they bought the test answers. At least now it's based on merit.

bought test answers from where? I read conspiracy theories being floated here. But in a real world, buyers can only exist when there is both a seller and a product present in the transaction. Who is the seller? Do they have a site where they sell this product?

It was the place that shall not be named. Continue to disbelieve what happened. That way you can continue to misunderstand one of the reasons for the admissions change (there were others too).

Let me get this. There was a place that cant be named, that sold a product that cant be mentioned, at a location that cannot be disclosed, that caused the admission change?

*chuckles* The place is called Curie Learning Centers.

The product is/was their flagship TJ prep course that featured, among many other things, a question bank for the secured Quant-Q exam that was inappropriately derived from their previous students reporting back on the questions they'd seen when they took the exam. While Curie didn't do anything illegal, what they did was unethical, as they used materials given to them by students who had signed an agreement not to disclose any materials from the Quant-Q. It's been confirmed many times by TJ students who attended Curie and the veracity of the story is no longer up for debate among serious people. The flagship course ran about $5,000 per student (not the $20K that has been mentioned here before) and ran for a 16-month period beginning for most students at the star of their 7th grade year and running up through the administration of the Student Information Sheet in January of 8th grade.

Curie has multiple locations in Loudoun and western Fairfax Counties.

To say that the Curie matter "caused" the admissions changes is perhaps not quite appropriate, but it absolutely highlighted the need for reform because of the program's success in securing admission to TJ and the growth of its claims year over year.

And before anyone comes at me with the snarky "look, another advertisement for Curie" nonsense, understand this:

I don't care at all how much money Dr. R is able to bilk off of insecure families - I only care that the families are not rewarded in admissions processes for having the money to burn.

Ok that's fine, but I have to wonder why would this matter so much, if each years Quant-Q questions are different... oh wait... are you saying FCPS doesn't bother to change the questions to an exam that thousands of kids took every year? That's clearly plain stupid.

I don't see this as any different than what other prep companies have done.. which is to falsely register folks to take the exam and report back the question, or at a minimum find out as much information as they can from past tests. But at least college board knows this is happening and changes the questions.

So you admit that it's unethical but are dinging FCPS for dropping the test after students obtained the test questions? Are you volunteering to write more test questions for the test maker? Didn't think so. The result is this new admissions process that doesn't use the test. You should be happy to hear that FCPS fixed the problem.

Yes of course it's unethical, but they're a business. Most people who do business, especially those working for corporations are doing numerous unethical things each day; a very significant portion of the people on these threads. Curie shouldn't have done that and many of the people reading this should also reconsider whether what they're doing in their life is hurting others.

But this was public and obvious because that is what for profit prep companies do. So FCPS was even worse because not only did they not care and just turned a blind eye to it, they never even bothered to help the underepresented minorities who did not have the money or knowledge on how to prep. They could at least have published practice materials to everyone, which would have defeated these prep companies. Moreover, how does one not change a test, it's standard procedure! They have no excuse either because it's not hard at all to write math questions for a one hour exam given once a year, especially with a budget in the billions.

The AP test industry is unethical, keeps stolen past exam questions compiled as practice tests out of reach of many potential and capable students. Instead of listing these products under sports category right next to basketball shoes, they created a separate category called Books. Imagine the outrageous difficulty that puts for underrepresented minorities (except asian americans) to reach these products. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ap+practice+tests

The College Board is even more unethical. One of their team writes questions, and another internal team is stealing those questions unethically and publishing it on their website, for free, can you imagine. Poor minorities cant get find them unless, they go through the hard labor of googling them. https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-calculus-ab/exam/past-exam-questions

This is height of unethical behavior. Publishing past exam questions for everyone to see.

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