Anonymous wrote:Here's the issue. The new spots by middle school model has kids at tj who wouldn't have even been semifinalists.
Because the old system was overwhelming skewed toward people who paid for prep so many weren't even given a fair shot at it.
You keep saying this and you are flat out wrong. A kid taking Algebra in 8th has no business being at TJ a supposed advanced STEM school
I'm one of the more anti- 8th graders in Algebra at TJ, but even I disagree with this. Being in a higher math level should count for something, but it shouldn't count for everything. TJ has always had kids taking Geometry in 9th grade. If the kid were to have teacher recommendations or any other evidence showing TJ to be a good fit despite the lower math level, that's fine. 9th graders in Geometry at TJ should be present, but somewhat rare.
I'd give bonus points to kids who have As in higher level math classes, but set it up where a very strong teacher recommendation or especially strong essays could compensate for that point deficit.
Anonymous wrote:Here's the issue. The new spots by middle school model has kids at tj who wouldn't have even been semifinalists.
Because the old system was overwhelming skewed toward people who paid for prep so many weren't even given a fair shot at it.
You keep saying this and you are flat out wrong. A kid taking Algebra in 8th has no business being at TJ a supposed advanced STEM school
I'm one of the more anti- 8th graders in Algebra at TJ, but even I disagree with this. Being in a higher math level should count for something, but it shouldn't count for everything. TJ has always had kids taking Geometry in 9th grade. If the kid were to have teacher recommendations or any other evidence showing TJ to be a good fit despite the lower math level, that's fine. 9th graders in Geometry at TJ should be present, but somewhat rare.
I'd give bonus points to kids who have As in higher level math classes, but set it up where a very strong teacher recommendation or especially strong essays could compensate for that point deficit.
Those folks don't belong at TJ. Folks taking Algebra in 8th are more than served staying at their local high school.
Again TJ is a STEM school for advanced STEM students whose needs/abilities can't be serviced by their base school.
Anonymous wrote:Meh. The % of Asians is still overwhelming high while URMs are still quite low.
They can and should fix the AAP va base center issue but I like the new angle of a certain minimum # of slots for each MS. Even with that attendees are heavily concentrated in certain areas but this helps spread it out a bit at least
bingo. won't rest till we can teach those uppity asians a lesson.
yep. we won't do the work. let's just accuse them of cheating. just say we can't devise any objective test - because we know we can't do well there and just try to spin things over and over. if nothing else works we will just try to close to close the school. bingo it is.
Laughable. What happened happened. Denying it or diminishing its importance doesn’t help your cause. Repeating it just makes you look uninformed, out of touch, and driven by an indefensible agenda.
Stuff like this is why Harry and Asra and the failed “we keep winning” Coalition against TJ keeps losing.
You lie again. Judge said FCPS was racist. Now it is under appeal.
The point of the lawsuit was to change the admissions process. The Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court both permitted it to continue for 2026, and the Fourth Circuit explicitly rejected Hilton’s reasoning in Judge Heytens’ opinion concurring with the appeal.
That was a big fat L.
And now Harry’s getting raked over the coals because he showed his whole arse in laughing at that kid doing the anthem at the SB meeting. Probably torpedoed what little chance he had of being electable.
Since I know he stalks these boards, I look forward to his response in 3….2…
#fakernews FCPS lost at the district court level. They filed and appeal to the Fourth Circuit and asked for a stay pending the decision on appeal. The Fourth Circuit granted the stay and the Supreme Court allowed the stay to remain. The appeal gets argued on September 16. So I'm not sure how you characterize this as a big fat L. You are probably another one of the those hack, arm chair lawyers that assured us the Coalition didn't have standing in the first place, would lose immediately, had no case, etc.
The Class of 2026 got selected and seated as planned, and as of right now there is absolutely no reason to expect that the Class of 2027 won't be seated in the same manner.
The Coalition doesn't even have named complainants anymore because they were both (remember, there were only two) eligible for the Class of 2026. Does anyone even know if those kids were admitted?
BIG
FAT
L.
But keep playing - you're doing great so far!!
What kind of ass clown calls a 2-1 decision on a stay order a big fat l?
Someone who prefers winning to name calling. The opinion agrees that FCPS is likely to succeed on appeal.
The Coalition is literally going to take a case to the Supreme Court with no names plaintiffs. If PLF even continues to do losing work pro bono.
Unfortunate that you losers had to go this route. "In an illegal effort to align TJ’s student body with the racial composition of the surrounding region, TJ abandoned its previous merit-based admissions system and adopted a new system designed to reduce dramatically the number of Asian-American students who attend TJ."
Not sure how why you'd call a system where the wealthy buy test answers merit based.
Not a single kid has ever been admitted to TJ because they bought test answers. In theory, if a kid bought the test answers and got a perfect score on the test, they would not have had the grades, teacher recommendations, essays, achievements and so on to get selected through the holistic process.
Curie said they placed over a third of the entering class that same year that many claimed they had seen questions in advance.
Citation for that? Over a third? If you're incapable of the most basic math, you really should stop posting. Anyway, Curie had 133 kids get offers. There are more than 399 kids in the TJ class, so it's not "over a third." It's actually going to be less than that since numerous TJ slots were double counted for the kids who declined TJ admission in favor of AOS/AET.
Even if Curie placed too many kids, that doesn't prove that they "bought the test answers." It shows that a substantial portion of Loudoun and Western Fairfax South Asian children have the grades, teacher recommendations, achievements, and essays to earn an admission offer in the holistic process. Kids never have been admitted to TJ with perfect test scores and nothing else to show for it. It is not entirely surprising to have so many Curie kids get admitted, since the South Asians in that area generally have advanced degrees in STEM. It's also not surprising that Curie kids will net most of the 90 or so LCPS slots, since the Venn diagram of kids in Loudoun who even want to commute all the way to TJ, Upper Middle Class South Asians, and Kids attending Curie is pretty much one single circle.
1) The correct number is 28%.
2) What proves that they "bought the test answers" is the consistently-confirmed narrative from Curie students who were in TJ's classes of 2023 and 2024 who have repeatedly said that they had seen questions from the secured Quant-Q exam while at Curie. Not the whole exam, but certain individual questions. That point is no longer up for debate among people who are to be taken seriously.
3) If you look at how the process for selecting semifinalists in the old admissions system worked (I'll distill it down to "the exams were graded on a curve" and "you had to be in a certain percentile to make the semifinalist round"), the artificially inflated exam scores that came with the inappropriately-acquired Curie question bank without a doubt removed many otherwise-qualified students from the semifinalist pool, meaning that the Admissions Committee didn't even get a chance to pass judgment on them. I can pretty much guarantee that dozens of Asian students who did not pay thousands of dollars for access to this question bank were eliminated from the process thanks to Curie's score inflation.
I agree that the way the Quant-Q was handled by Curie and TJ admissions was problematic, and eliminating the test was a good idea. Eliminating the rest of the comprehensive packet, however, was a terrible move. Someone keeps posting the falsehood that any kid could buy their way into TJ via Curie. That is not the case. The kids still needed a strong packet to get through the holistic review. If, in theory, a kid bought the entire Quant-Q from Curie (which they did not. At best, the kids saw a couple questions and got training on similar styles of questions), but was otherwise mediocre, that kid would have made Semifinalist, but then not been awarded a seat at TJ.
The data and I are going to have to disagree with you again. TJ Admissions used to publish on their slides for Admissions Information Sessions the average test percentiles for students at various levels of the process. Overall applicants, semifinalists, and those offered admission. There was a significant delta between the semifinalists and those offered admission in all three exams, suggesting that the exam score was a major factor in the holistic review. And who could blame the committee for this?
And guess what? By far, the biggest delta between the performance of semifinalists and offers was on the Quant-Q.
It was adopted as a secured exam, it was the single biggest separator at both the first and second thresholds of selection - and it was compromised.
So, you have data showing that kids with mediocre packets were offered admissions based solely on their test scores? Please share it.
There are 3 groups of kids with high Quant-Q scores: The naturally gifted, the prep kids who also have strong packets, and the prep kids who have weak packets. Admitting the first and second groups, for the most part deservedly so, would lead to exactly the data that you're citing. There is no evidence that any kids from the third group were admitted to TJ in the old system. They're definitely getting in now, so great job with the reforms!
...there's no evidence for my assertion other than the statistical significance of the data (which is, if you've studied statistics, more than adequate). There's REALLY no evidence for your assertion, either pre-or-post reforms, with respect to that third group. So the above is valueless nonsense.
Correlation does not equal causation. Surely, someone as versed in statistics as you claim to be would know this basic fact. There's a high correlation between test scores and admissions. That doesn't mean that test scores were the primary factor in admissions, given that there is also supposed to be a very high correlation between test scores and student quality. A goodly number of the top kids in the TJ pool would have had both the test scores and the overall packet.
That being said, just how much would exposure to some Quant-Q like questions skew one's performance on the test? It is doubtful that completely average kids were getting perfect scores. If anything, it's probably akin to the CogAT, where prep can increase a score by maybe 10-15 points, but no more than that. Would that lead to the "wrong" kids filling out the bottom half of the Semifinalist pool? Would it lead to different kids being selected to fill out some spots in the bottom half of TJ? Sure, to both of those. I'm much less concerned with getting the right kids into the bottom 1/4 of TJ than I am with getting the top 50 kids into TJ.
Anecdotally, I know several kids in that third group who were admitted into the class of 2026. They would not have been admitted under any sort of comprehensive, holistic review.
Oh boy, I can weigh in here. I'm a former employee of a school that served as a testing center for TJ and I was a proctor for the exams for many years. I had to sign an NDA starting with the first year that the Quant was used. I'll never forget that first year (it was I think November of 2017) because for the first time ever, we had dozens of students literally crying in their seats because they had no idea what to do with the Quant. These were kids with exceptional grades, advanced in math (some were even in Alg2 at the time), who in any other year would have been shoo-ins to get in to TJ. You could tell that it affected them in a very profound way to be taking an exam that they weren't prepared for. These same kids buzzed through the ACT English and Science exams afterwards but when they went to their parents they were sobbing because they knew they had blown the Quant and blown their chance at TJ. After seeing the admissions numbers go out that year I wasn't surprised. The next year when I proctored again, we didn't have any issues. No kids crying during the exam, no kids crying when they went back to see mom and dad. The one year that this happened was the first year of the Quant. And it was fishy to me because I knew the kids had signed the very same thing I did.
Name the school or it didn't happen.
Nice try. Not naming the school I used to work at and it did happen.
Don't feed the troll. PP made this story up. My DD tested that year and didn't mention any kids crying.
Anonymous wrote:Here's the issue. The new spots by middle school model has kids at tj who wouldn't have even been semifinalists.
Because the old system was overwhelming skewed toward people who paid for prep so many weren't even given a fair shot at it.
You keep saying this and you are flat out wrong. A kid taking Algebra in 8th has no business being at TJ a supposed advanced STEM school
I'm one of the more anti- 8th graders in Algebra at TJ, but even I disagree with this. Being in a higher math level should count for something, but it shouldn't count for everything. TJ has always had kids taking Geometry in 9th grade. If the kid were to have teacher recommendations or any other evidence showing TJ to be a good fit despite the lower math level, that's fine. 9th graders in Geometry at TJ should be present, but somewhat rare.
I'd give bonus points to kids who have As in higher level math classes, but set it up where a very strong teacher recommendation or especially strong essays could compensate for that point deficit.
Those folks don't belong at TJ. Folks taking Algebra in 8th are more than served staying at their local high school.
Again TJ is a STEM school for advanced STEM students whose needs/abilities can't be serviced by their base school.
Just the opposite, make it so everyone takes Algebra in 8th so they're on the same footing. Giving families that pay for outside enrichment a leg up seems wrong.
DP, and you're wrong. TJ is a Governor's school, and thus has all of the properties of a Governor's school. https://doe.virginia.gov/instruction/governors_school_programs/ "The Virginia Governor's School Program has been designed to assist divisions as they meet the needs of a small population of students whose learning levels are remarkably different from their age-level peers. The foundation of the Virginia Governor's School Program centers on best practices in the field of gifted education and the presentation of advanced content to able learners"
Anonymous wrote:Meh. The % of Asians is still overwhelming high while URMs are still quite low.
They can and should fix the AAP va base center issue but I like the new angle of a certain minimum # of slots for each MS. Even with that attendees are heavily concentrated in certain areas but this helps spread it out a bit at least
bingo. won't rest till we can teach those uppity asians a lesson.
yep. we won't do the work. let's just accuse them of cheating. just say we can't devise any objective test - because we know we can't do well there and just try to spin things over and over. if nothing else works we will just try to close to close the school. bingo it is.
Laughable. What happened happened. Denying it or diminishing its importance doesn’t help your cause. Repeating it just makes you look uninformed, out of touch, and driven by an indefensible agenda.
Stuff like this is why Harry and Asra and the failed “we keep winning” Coalition against TJ keeps losing.
You lie again. Judge said FCPS was racist. Now it is under appeal.
The point of the lawsuit was to change the admissions process. The Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court both permitted it to continue for 2026, and the Fourth Circuit explicitly rejected Hilton’s reasoning in Judge Heytens’ opinion concurring with the appeal.
That was a big fat L.
And now Harry’s getting raked over the coals because he showed his whole arse in laughing at that kid doing the anthem at the SB meeting. Probably torpedoed what little chance he had of being electable.
Since I know he stalks these boards, I look forward to his response in 3….2…
#fakernews FCPS lost at the district court level. They filed and appeal to the Fourth Circuit and asked for a stay pending the decision on appeal. The Fourth Circuit granted the stay and the Supreme Court allowed the stay to remain. The appeal gets argued on September 16. So I'm not sure how you characterize this as a big fat L. You are probably another one of the those hack, arm chair lawyers that assured us the Coalition didn't have standing in the first place, would lose immediately, had no case, etc.
The Class of 2026 got selected and seated as planned, and as of right now there is absolutely no reason to expect that the Class of 2027 won't be seated in the same manner.
The Coalition doesn't even have named complainants anymore because they were both (remember, there were only two) eligible for the Class of 2026. Does anyone even know if those kids were admitted?
BIG
FAT
L.
But keep playing - you're doing great so far!!
What kind of ass clown calls a 2-1 decision on a stay order a big fat l?
Someone who prefers winning to name calling. The opinion agrees that FCPS is likely to succeed on appeal.
The Coalition is literally going to take a case to the Supreme Court with no names plaintiffs. If PLF even continues to do losing work pro bono.
Unfortunate that you losers had to go this route. "In an illegal effort to align TJ’s student body with the racial composition of the surrounding region, TJ abandoned its previous merit-based admissions system and adopted a new system designed to reduce dramatically the number of Asian-American students who attend TJ."
Not sure how why you'd call a system where the wealthy buy test answers merit based.
Not a single kid has ever been admitted to TJ because they bought test answers. In theory, if a kid bought the test answers and got a perfect score on the test, they would not have had the grades, teacher recommendations, essays, achievements and so on to get selected through the holistic process.
Curie said they placed over a third of the entering class that same year that many claimed they had seen questions in advance.
Citation for that? Over a third? If you're incapable of the most basic math, you really should stop posting. Anyway, Curie had 133 kids get offers. There are more than 399 kids in the TJ class, so it's not "over a third." It's actually going to be less than that since numerous TJ slots were double counted for the kids who declined TJ admission in favor of AOS/AET.
Even if Curie placed too many kids, that doesn't prove that they "bought the test answers." It shows that a substantial portion of Loudoun and Western Fairfax South Asian children have the grades, teacher recommendations, achievements, and essays to earn an admission offer in the holistic process. Kids never have been admitted to TJ with perfect test scores and nothing else to show for it. It is not entirely surprising to have so many Curie kids get admitted, since the South Asians in that area generally have advanced degrees in STEM. It's also not surprising that Curie kids will net most of the 90 or so LCPS slots, since the Venn diagram of kids in Loudoun who even want to commute all the way to TJ, Upper Middle Class South Asians, and Kids attending Curie is pretty much one single circle.
1) The correct number is 28%.
2) What proves that they "bought the test answers" is the consistently-confirmed narrative from Curie students who were in TJ's classes of 2023 and 2024 who have repeatedly said that they had seen questions from the secured Quant-Q exam while at Curie. Not the whole exam, but certain individual questions. That point is no longer up for debate among people who are to be taken seriously.
3) If you look at how the process for selecting semifinalists in the old admissions system worked (I'll distill it down to "the exams were graded on a curve" and "you had to be in a certain percentile to make the semifinalist round"), the artificially inflated exam scores that came with the inappropriately-acquired Curie question bank without a doubt removed many otherwise-qualified students from the semifinalist pool, meaning that the Admissions Committee didn't even get a chance to pass judgment on them. I can pretty much guarantee that dozens of Asian students who did not pay thousands of dollars for access to this question bank were eliminated from the process thanks to Curie's score inflation.
I agree that the way the Quant-Q was handled by Curie and TJ admissions was problematic, and eliminating the test was a good idea. Eliminating the rest of the comprehensive packet, however, was a terrible move. Someone keeps posting the falsehood that any kid could buy their way into TJ via Curie. That is not the case. The kids still needed a strong packet to get through the holistic review. If, in theory, a kid bought the entire Quant-Q from Curie (which they did not. At best, the kids saw a couple questions and got training on similar styles of questions), but was otherwise mediocre, that kid would have made Semifinalist, but then not been awarded a seat at TJ.
The data and I are going to have to disagree with you again. TJ Admissions used to publish on their slides for Admissions Information Sessions the average test percentiles for students at various levels of the process. Overall applicants, semifinalists, and those offered admission. There was a significant delta between the semifinalists and those offered admission in all three exams, suggesting that the exam score was a major factor in the holistic review. And who could blame the committee for this?
And guess what? By far, the biggest delta between the performance of semifinalists and offers was on the Quant-Q.
It was adopted as a secured exam, it was the single biggest separator at both the first and second thresholds of selection - and it was compromised.
So, you have data showing that kids with mediocre packets were offered admissions based solely on their test scores? Please share it.
There are 3 groups of kids with high Quant-Q scores: The naturally gifted, the prep kids who also have strong packets, and the prep kids who have weak packets. Admitting the first and second groups, for the most part deservedly so, would lead to exactly the data that you're citing. There is no evidence that any kids from the third group were admitted to TJ in the old system. They're definitely getting in now, so great job with the reforms!
...there's no evidence for my assertion other than the statistical significance of the data (which is, if you've studied statistics, more than adequate). There's REALLY no evidence for your assertion, either pre-or-post reforms, with respect to that third group. So the above is valueless nonsense.
Correlation does not equal causation. Surely, someone as versed in statistics as you claim to be would know this basic fact. There's a high correlation between test scores and admissions. That doesn't mean that test scores were the primary factor in admissions, given that there is also supposed to be a very high correlation between test scores and student quality. A goodly number of the top kids in the TJ pool would have had both the test scores and the overall packet.
That being said, just how much would exposure to some Quant-Q like questions skew one's performance on the test? It is doubtful that completely average kids were getting perfect scores. If anything, it's probably akin to the CogAT, where prep can increase a score by maybe 10-15 points, but no more than that. Would that lead to the "wrong" kids filling out the bottom half of the Semifinalist pool? Would it lead to different kids being selected to fill out some spots in the bottom half of TJ? Sure, to both of those. I'm much less concerned with getting the right kids into the bottom 1/4 of TJ than I am with getting the top 50 kids into TJ.
Anecdotally, I know several kids in that third group who were admitted into the class of 2026. They would not have been admitted under any sort of comprehensive, holistic review.
Oh boy, I can weigh in here. I'm a former employee of a school that served as a testing center for TJ and I was a proctor for the exams for many years. I had to sign an NDA starting with the first year that the Quant was used. I'll never forget that first year (it was I think November of 2017) because for the first time ever, we had dozens of students literally crying in their seats because they had no idea what to do with the Quant. These were kids with exceptional grades, advanced in math (some were even in Alg2 at the time), who in any other year would have been shoo-ins to get in to TJ. You could tell that it affected them in a very profound way to be taking an exam that they weren't prepared for. These same kids buzzed through the ACT English and Science exams afterwards but when they went to their parents they were sobbing because they knew they had blown the Quant and blown their chance at TJ. After seeing the admissions numbers go out that year I wasn't surprised. The next year when I proctored again, we didn't have any issues. No kids crying during the exam, no kids crying when they went back to see mom and dad. The one year that this happened was the first year of the Quant. And it was fishy to me because I knew the kids had signed the very same thing I did.
Name the school or it didn't happen.
Nice try. Not naming the school I used to work at and it did happen.
You have such detail on what each kid did before and after you proctored the exam. were you stalking multiple kids at the same time? such a transparently fake story. oh boy.
I was in the room. Wasn't exactly tough to see what was going on. Good try though.
Anonymous wrote:Here's the issue. The new spots by middle school model has kids at tj who wouldn't have even been semifinalists.
Because the old system was overwhelming skewed toward people who paid for prep so many weren't even given a fair shot at it.
You keep saying this and you are flat out wrong. A kid taking Algebra in 8th has no business being at TJ a supposed advanced STEM school
Completely false. The majority of the students who have graduated from TJ in its history were taking Algebra in 8th grade. It has only been fairly recently - say, within the last dozen years or so - that the majority of incoming students in each class at were advanced beyond Algebra in 8th grade.
Anonymous wrote:Here's the issue. The new spots by middle school model has kids at tj who wouldn't have even been semifinalists.
Because the old system was overwhelming skewed toward people who paid for prep so many weren't even given a fair shot at it.
You keep saying this and you are flat out wrong. A kid taking Algebra in 8th has no business being at TJ a supposed advanced STEM school
I'm one of the more anti- 8th graders in Algebra at TJ, but even I disagree with this. Being in a higher math level should count for something, but it shouldn't count for everything. TJ has always had kids taking Geometry in 9th grade. If the kid were to have teacher recommendations or any other evidence showing TJ to be a good fit despite the lower math level, that's fine. 9th graders in Geometry at TJ should be present, but somewhat rare.
I'd give bonus points to kids who have As in higher level math classes, but set it up where a very strong teacher recommendation or especially strong essays could compensate for that point deficit.
We don't need to have "points" at all. Just have a more comprehensive application and leave the admissions committee to do their job. Points systems encourage gaming those systems.
Anonymous wrote:Meh. The % of Asians is still overwhelming high while URMs are still quite low.
They can and should fix the AAP va base center issue but I like the new angle of a certain minimum # of slots for each MS. Even with that attendees are heavily concentrated in certain areas but this helps spread it out a bit at least
bingo. won't rest till we can teach those uppity asians a lesson.
yep. we won't do the work. let's just accuse them of cheating. just say we can't devise any objective test - because we know we can't do well there and just try to spin things over and over. if nothing else works we will just try to close to close the school. bingo it is.
Laughable. What happened happened. Denying it or diminishing its importance doesn’t help your cause. Repeating it just makes you look uninformed, out of touch, and driven by an indefensible agenda.
Stuff like this is why Harry and Asra and the failed “we keep winning” Coalition against TJ keeps losing.
You lie again. Judge said FCPS was racist. Now it is under appeal.
The point of the lawsuit was to change the admissions process. The Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court both permitted it to continue for 2026, and the Fourth Circuit explicitly rejected Hilton’s reasoning in Judge Heytens’ opinion concurring with the appeal.
That was a big fat L.
And now Harry’s getting raked over the coals because he showed his whole arse in laughing at that kid doing the anthem at the SB meeting. Probably torpedoed what little chance he had of being electable.
Since I know he stalks these boards, I look forward to his response in 3….2…
#fakernews FCPS lost at the district court level. They filed and appeal to the Fourth Circuit and asked for a stay pending the decision on appeal. The Fourth Circuit granted the stay and the Supreme Court allowed the stay to remain. The appeal gets argued on September 16. So I'm not sure how you characterize this as a big fat L. You are probably another one of the those hack, arm chair lawyers that assured us the Coalition didn't have standing in the first place, would lose immediately, had no case, etc.
The Class of 2026 got selected and seated as planned, and as of right now there is absolutely no reason to expect that the Class of 2027 won't be seated in the same manner.
The Coalition doesn't even have named complainants anymore because they were both (remember, there were only two) eligible for the Class of 2026. Does anyone even know if those kids were admitted?
BIG
FAT
L.
But keep playing - you're doing great so far!!
What kind of ass clown calls a 2-1 decision on a stay order a big fat l?
Someone who prefers winning to name calling. The opinion agrees that FCPS is likely to succeed on appeal.
The Coalition is literally going to take a case to the Supreme Court with no names plaintiffs. If PLF even continues to do losing work pro bono.
Unfortunate that you losers had to go this route. "In an illegal effort to align TJ’s student body with the racial composition of the surrounding region, TJ abandoned its previous merit-based admissions system and adopted a new system designed to reduce dramatically the number of Asian-American students who attend TJ."
Not sure how why you'd call a system where the wealthy buy test answers merit based.
Not a single kid has ever been admitted to TJ because they bought test answers. In theory, if a kid bought the test answers and got a perfect score on the test, they would not have had the grades, teacher recommendations, essays, achievements and so on to get selected through the holistic process.
Curie said they placed over a third of the entering class that same year that many claimed they had seen questions in advance.
Citation for that? Over a third? If you're incapable of the most basic math, you really should stop posting. Anyway, Curie had 133 kids get offers. There are more than 399 kids in the TJ class, so it's not "over a third." It's actually going to be less than that since numerous TJ slots were double counted for the kids who declined TJ admission in favor of AOS/AET.
Even if Curie placed too many kids, that doesn't prove that they "bought the test answers." It shows that a substantial portion of Loudoun and Western Fairfax South Asian children have the grades, teacher recommendations, achievements, and essays to earn an admission offer in the holistic process. Kids never have been admitted to TJ with perfect test scores and nothing else to show for it. It is not entirely surprising to have so many Curie kids get admitted, since the South Asians in that area generally have advanced degrees in STEM. It's also not surprising that Curie kids will net most of the 90 or so LCPS slots, since the Venn diagram of kids in Loudoun who even want to commute all the way to TJ, Upper Middle Class South Asians, and Kids attending Curie is pretty much one single circle.
1) The correct number is 28%.
2) What proves that they "bought the test answers" is the consistently-confirmed narrative from Curie students who were in TJ's classes of 2023 and 2024 who have repeatedly said that they had seen questions from the secured Quant-Q exam while at Curie. Not the whole exam, but certain individual questions. That point is no longer up for debate among people who are to be taken seriously.
3) If you look at how the process for selecting semifinalists in the old admissions system worked (I'll distill it down to "the exams were graded on a curve" and "you had to be in a certain percentile to make the semifinalist round"), the artificially inflated exam scores that came with the inappropriately-acquired Curie question bank without a doubt removed many otherwise-qualified students from the semifinalist pool, meaning that the Admissions Committee didn't even get a chance to pass judgment on them. I can pretty much guarantee that dozens of Asian students who did not pay thousands of dollars for access to this question bank were eliminated from the process thanks to Curie's score inflation.
I agree that the way the Quant-Q was handled by Curie and TJ admissions was problematic, and eliminating the test was a good idea. Eliminating the rest of the comprehensive packet, however, was a terrible move. Someone keeps posting the falsehood that any kid could buy their way into TJ via Curie. That is not the case. The kids still needed a strong packet to get through the holistic review. If, in theory, a kid bought the entire Quant-Q from Curie (which they did not. At best, the kids saw a couple questions and got training on similar styles of questions), but was otherwise mediocre, that kid would have made Semifinalist, but then not been awarded a seat at TJ.
The data and I are going to have to disagree with you again. TJ Admissions used to publish on their slides for Admissions Information Sessions the average test percentiles for students at various levels of the process. Overall applicants, semifinalists, and those offered admission. There was a significant delta between the semifinalists and those offered admission in all three exams, suggesting that the exam score was a major factor in the holistic review. And who could blame the committee for this?
And guess what? By far, the biggest delta between the performance of semifinalists and offers was on the Quant-Q.
It was adopted as a secured exam, it was the single biggest separator at both the first and second thresholds of selection - and it was compromised.
So, you have data showing that kids with mediocre packets were offered admissions based solely on their test scores? Please share it.
There are 3 groups of kids with high Quant-Q scores: The naturally gifted, the prep kids who also have strong packets, and the prep kids who have weak packets. Admitting the first and second groups, for the most part deservedly so, would lead to exactly the data that you're citing. There is no evidence that any kids from the third group were admitted to TJ in the old system. They're definitely getting in now, so great job with the reforms!
...there's no evidence for my assertion other than the statistical significance of the data (which is, if you've studied statistics, more than adequate). There's REALLY no evidence for your assertion, either pre-or-post reforms, with respect to that third group. So the above is valueless nonsense.
Correlation does not equal causation. Surely, someone as versed in statistics as you claim to be would know this basic fact. There's a high correlation between test scores and admissions. That doesn't mean that test scores were the primary factor in admissions, given that there is also supposed to be a very high correlation between test scores and student quality. A goodly number of the top kids in the TJ pool would have had both the test scores and the overall packet.
That being said, just how much would exposure to some Quant-Q like questions skew one's performance on the test? It is doubtful that completely average kids were getting perfect scores. If anything, it's probably akin to the CogAT, where prep can increase a score by maybe 10-15 points, but no more than that. Would that lead to the "wrong" kids filling out the bottom half of the Semifinalist pool? Would it lead to different kids being selected to fill out some spots in the bottom half of TJ? Sure, to both of those. I'm much less concerned with getting the right kids into the bottom 1/4 of TJ than I am with getting the top 50 kids into TJ.
Anecdotally, I know several kids in that third group who were admitted into the class of 2026. They would not have been admitted under any sort of comprehensive, holistic review.
Oh boy, I can weigh in here. I'm a former employee of a school that served as a testing center for TJ and I was a proctor for the exams for many years. I had to sign an NDA starting with the first year that the Quant was used. I'll never forget that first year (it was I think November of 2017) because for the first time ever, we had dozens of students literally crying in their seats because they had no idea what to do with the Quant. These were kids with exceptional grades, advanced in math (some were even in Alg2 at the time), who in any other year would have been shoo-ins to get in to TJ. You could tell that it affected them in a very profound way to be taking an exam that they weren't prepared for. These same kids buzzed through the ACT English and Science exams afterwards but when they went to their parents they were sobbing because they knew they had blown the Quant and blown their chance at TJ. After seeing the admissions numbers go out that year I wasn't surprised. The next year when I proctored again, we didn't have any issues. No kids crying during the exam, no kids crying when they went back to see mom and dad. The one year that this happened was the first year of the Quant. And it was fishy to me because I knew the kids had signed the very same thing I did.
Name the school or it didn't happen.
Nice try. Not naming the school I used to work at and it did happen.
Don't feed the troll. PP made this story up. My DD tested that year and didn't mention any kids crying.
There are a lot of schools that serve as testing sites (something like 15-20 every year). Mine had this, and it sounds like someone else's did too. The fact that your kid didn't mention it or notice it doesn't mean it didn't happen, and if it didn't happen at your site that doesn't mean it didn't happen elsewhere.
I understand that it's inconvenient to your narrative, but it's a really sad thing that I witnessed one time, and it stuck out because it was the only time I'd seen it over many years.
Anonymous wrote:Here's the issue. The new spots by middle school model has kids at tj who wouldn't have even been semifinalists.
Because the old system was overwhelming skewed toward people who paid for prep so many weren't even given a fair shot at it.
You keep saying this and you are flat out wrong. A kid taking Algebra in 8th has no business being at TJ a supposed advanced STEM school
Completely false. The majority of the students who have graduated from TJ in its history were taking Algebra in 8th grade. It has only been fairly recently - say, within the last dozen years or so - that the majority of incoming students in each class at were advanced beyond Algebra in 8th grade.
Exactly, this was done as a way to roadblock the less affluent and give parents who invest in enrichment more of a leg up.
Anonymous wrote:Here's the issue. The new spots by middle school model has kids at tj who wouldn't have even been semifinalists.
Because the old system was overwhelming skewed toward people who paid for prep so many weren't even given a fair shot at it.
You keep saying this and you are flat out wrong. A kid taking Algebra in 8th has no business being at TJ a supposed advanced STEM school
Completely false. The majority of the students who have graduated from TJ in its history were taking Algebra in 8th grade. It has only been fairly recently - say, within the last dozen years or so - that the majority of incoming students in each class at were advanced beyond Algebra in 8th grade.
My kid graduated from TJ 7 years ago and even back then there was only 1 class for Geometry class and even fewer taking algebra I about handful. It was shameful to be taking Geometry class at TJ as a freshmen.
Anonymous wrote:Here's the issue. The new spots by middle school model has kids at tj who wouldn't have even been semifinalists.
Because the old system was overwhelming skewed toward people who paid for prep so many weren't even given a fair shot at it.
You keep saying this and you are flat out wrong. A kid taking Algebra in 8th has no business being at TJ a supposed advanced STEM school
Completely false. The majority of the students who have graduated from TJ in its history were taking Algebra in 8th grade. It has only been fairly recently - say, within the last dozen years or so - that the majority of incoming students in each class at were advanced beyond Algebra in 8th grade.
It was set up this way a few years back to give those who can afford outside an enrichment a leg up over those who cannot.
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}