Is CogAT gone forever?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

Nice explanation, but the discussion was about whether Cogat was used or not. There is no “little bit correct”. The poster who claimed Cogat was not used was wrong and the poster who said it was used was correct.

DP. CogAT was used through this year's 9th graders, who were identified during the 2019-20 school year from data gathered prior to the CovID shutdown. This year's 8th graders were identified with an any-of-a-few heuristic, using MAP because they couldn't administer CogAT in the remote setting across the huge numbers at MCPS. This year's 7th graders were identified with a strict (though FARMS-rate locally normed) cutoff for the fall MAP of their 5th-grade year with additional requirements (grades, etc., employed in a this-AND-that paradigm, not any-of-a-few or sliding-scale). This year's 6th graders were identified similarly, but the local norming was much stricter, as pandemic recovery showed highly differentially between high-FARMS (scores remained more depressed vs. national norms) and low-FARMS (closer to pre-pandemic performance, with lots of high scorers) -- this meant a higher score was needed from a low-FARMS school to get in to the lottery for this year's 6th grade class than it had been from a prior year.

MCPS still will not provide all of the detail.

I’m not sure why you stated this as if you were saying something different. The issue was that Cogat was used for this years 9th graders (last years 8th) and you are saying the same thing, which is correct.

I was a different poster ("DP") supporting via clarification.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

Why should Frost be so special? Are there different supports/options available to students at Frost & Frost feeders, or is it just monied families facilitating via outside enrichment?

Many of the feeders offer acceleration unavailable elsewhere. Also, seems like the community is more interested in this and tends to invest more heavily in outside enrichment at RSM or AoPS. Not to mention many of the stronger Frost students would've been at TPMS before the lottery, but aren't selected because lotteries are random.

The community investing heavily is fine. The stronger students forming a good local cohort is fine. The feeders offering acceleration unavailable elsewhere absolutley is not fine. The system shouldn't support resource hoarding. It should ensure equivalent access.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

The bigger question is WHY is the bar set so low? They know how many magnet seats there are (a couple hundred) and they know that if they set the lottery threshold at the (locally normed) 85th percentile they will end up with thousands of names in the lottery. Just how many we don’t actually know because for some reason they are super secretive about this for no good reason even though they are supposed to publish this data. Let’s guess it’s 5,000. Why are we setting the bar at the 85th percentile when we could be setting it at the 90th or 95th percentile and still have plenty of universally screened students in the lottery enough to yield fully filled seats? If the argument is that all those kids could do the work, then why are we even having this super small specialized program if you have many thousands of students who should have their identified needs met with similarly challenging courses throughout the county?

Oh wow. Perhaps we need some basic math classes for parents! There are about 10-11k students in most grade levels in MCPS. The top 15 percent get into the lottery if the 85 percent threshold hasn’t changed (and it definitely hasn’t gone down), but only if they meet the other criteria which includes As in the relevant subjects. 15 percent of 10k is not 5,000! It’s 1500, so somewhere less than 1500 is the universe of kids who got into the lottery. Judging by how much the eastern waitlist moved for example, I’d guess the number is much much lower than that.

85 %ile national. MCPS students, as a whole, score considerably higher than the national average -- the distribution shifts to the right. It may not be half the MCPS population that scores 85th or above, but it is a great deal more than 15 percent.

No. You are wrong. It’s 85th percentile LOCAL. Which means the top 15 percent are in the lottery. Anyone who knows anything about this knows they use 85 percent local which translates into 95 percent national or so in some schools and 70 percent in others.

This is absolutely correct. I know several kids with scores in the 85-93 range who were not in the key because their local percentile was way beyond the cut off. One parent I know sprayed and learned that her kid’s 88% was 65% in MCPS.

While that is true, the other poster is actually more correct. There are a lot of kids in mcps who score in the tippy top percentiles (99, 98, 97). Even with local norming manipulating the scores, if you have 25 kids in a school who have these scores, they all still get into the pool even if there’s only 90 kids in the grade. It ends up being more than a straight top 15 percent.

Oh come on. Do you really not understand percentiles???? It staggers me how posters on this forum fail to understand basic math but advocate for their kids to be in all the advanced classes. The fact is that the top 15 percent in each of the groupings (schools grouped by poverty level) gets in to the pool. Where there are lots of kids at the top of the range, people at the bottom don’t get in. That’s why the national cut off isn’t 85 but 92 or 93 for lower poverty schools. No the other poster is not “more” correct. The top 15 percent is the top 15 percent. If everyone got 99th percentile nationally then the kids that got in would be the top 15 percent of that group (eg those scoring 99.85 percent and above).

It’s amazing that so many supposedly intelligent people can’t grasp this and insist that 5000 people are in the pool because everyone is so smart and all their kids friends are allegedly 99th percentile. I would be willing to bet that pool is no more than 1000 kids county wide, but then again I apparently have a better understanding of stats than most posters.

And loads of humility. Truth is, there is an actual concrete number of kids in the pool. Why MCPS chooses to keep this top secret is unclear.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

The bigger question is WHY is the bar set so low? They know how many magnet seats there are (a couple hundred) and they know that if they set the lottery threshold at the (locally normed) 85th percentile they will end up with thousands of names in the lottery. Just how many we don’t actually know because for some reason they are super secretive about this for no good reason even though they are supposed to publish this data. Let’s guess it’s 5,000. Why are we setting the bar at the 85th percentile when we could be setting it at the 90th or 95th percentile and still have plenty of universally screened students in the lottery enough to yield fully filled seats? If the argument is that all those kids could do the work, then why are we even having this super small specialized program if you have many thousands of students who should have their identified needs met with similarly challenging courses throughout the county?

Oh wow. Perhaps we need some basic math classes for parents! There are about 10-11k students in most grade levels in MCPS. The top 15 percent get into the lottery if the 85 percent threshold hasn’t changed (and it definitely hasn’t gone down), but only if they meet the other criteria which includes As in the relevant subjects. 15 percent of 10k is not 5,000! It’s 1500, so somewhere less than 1500 is the universe of kids who got into the lottery. Judging by how much the eastern waitlist moved for example, I’d guess the number is much much lower than that.

85 %ile national. MCPS students, as a whole, score considerably higher than the national average -- the distribution shifts to the right. It may not be half the MCPS population that scores 85th or above, but it is a great deal more than 15 percent.

No. You are wrong. It’s 85th percentile LOCAL. Which means the top 15 percent are in the lottery. Anyone who knows anything about this knows they use 85 percent local which translates into 95 percent national or so in some schools and 70 percent in others.

This is absolutely correct. I know several kids with scores in the 85-93 range who were not in the key because their local percentile was way beyond the cut off. One parent I know sprayed and learned that her kid’s 88% was 65% in MCPS.

While that is true, the other poster is actually more correct. There are a lot of kids in mcps who score in the tippy top percentiles (99, 98, 97). Even with local norming manipulating the scores, if you have 25 kids in a school who have these scores, they all still get into the pool even if there’s only 90 kids in the grade. It ends up being more than a straight top 15 percent.

Oh come on. Do you really not understand percentiles???? It staggers me how posters on this forum fail to understand basic math but advocate for their kids to be in all the advanced classes. The fact is that the top 15 percent in each of the groupings (schools grouped by poverty level) gets in to the pool. Where there are lots of kids at the top of the range, people at the bottom don’t get in. That’s why the national cut off isn’t 85 but 92 or 93 for lower poverty schools. No the other poster is not “more” correct. The top 15 percent is the top 15 percent. If everyone got 99th percentile nationally then the kids that got in would be the top 15 percent of that group (eg those scoring 99.85 percent and above).

It’s amazing that so many supposedly intelligent people can’t grasp this and insist that 5000 people are in the pool because everyone is so smart and all their kids friends are allegedly 99th percentile. I would be willing to bet that pool is no more than 1000 kids county wide, but then again I apparently have a better understanding of stats than most posters.

And loads of humility. Truth is, there is an actual concrete number of kids in the pool. Why MCPS chooses to keep this top secret is unclear.

Well they haven’t really, have they? They’ve clearly said top 15% in the county and anyone can work out what that number is. Then there are other criteria re grades that make that number smaller. I don’t know why there are always claims that it’s not transparent because there’s plenty of info out there on what the criteria is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

The bigger question is WHY is the bar set so low? They know how many magnet seats there are (a couple hundred) and they know that if they set the lottery threshold at the (locally normed) 85th percentile they will end up with thousands of names in the lottery. Just how many we don’t actually know because for some reason they are super secretive about this for no good reason even though they are supposed to publish this data. Let’s guess it’s 5,000. Why are we setting the bar at the 85th percentile when we could be setting it at the 90th or 95th percentile and still have plenty of universally screened students in the lottery enough to yield fully filled seats? If the argument is that all those kids could do the work, then why are we even having this super small specialized program if you have many thousands of students who should have their identified needs met with similarly challenging courses throughout the county?

Oh wow. Perhaps we need some basic math classes for parents! There are about 10-11k students in most grade levels in MCPS. The top 15 percent get into the lottery if the 85 percent threshold hasn’t changed (and it definitely hasn’t gone down), but only if they meet the other criteria which includes As in the relevant subjects. 15 percent of 10k is not 5,000! It’s 1500, so somewhere less than 1500 is the universe of kids who got into the lottery. Judging by how much the eastern waitlist moved for example, I’d guess the number is much much lower than that.

85 %ile national. MCPS students, as a whole, score considerably higher than the national average -- the distribution shifts to the right. It may not be half the MCPS population that scores 85th or above, but it is a great deal more than 15 percent.

No. You are wrong. It’s 85th percentile LOCAL. Which means the top 15 percent are in the lottery. Anyone who knows anything about this knows they use 85 percent local which translates into 95 percent national or so in some schools and 70 percent in others.

This is absolutely correct. I know several kids with scores in the 85-93 range who were not in the key because their local percentile was way beyond the cut off. One parent I know sprayed and learned that her kid’s 88% was 65% in MCPS.

While that is true, the other poster is actually more correct. There are a lot of kids in mcps who score in the tippy top percentiles (99, 98, 97). Even with local norming manipulating the scores, if you have 25 kids in a school who have these scores, they all still get into the pool even if there’s only 90 kids in the grade. It ends up being more than a straight top 15 percent.

Oh come on. Do you really not understand percentiles???? It staggers me how posters on this forum fail to understand basic math but advocate for their kids to be in all the advanced classes. The fact is that the top 15 percent in each of the groupings (schools grouped by poverty level) gets in to the pool. Where there are lots of kids at the top of the range, people at the bottom don’t get in. That’s why the national cut off isn’t 85 but 92 or 93 for lower poverty schools. No the other poster is not “more” correct. The top 15 percent is the top 15 percent. If everyone got 99th percentile nationally then the kids that got in would be the top 15 percent of that group (eg those scoring 99.85 percent and above).

It’s amazing that so many supposedly intelligent people can’t grasp this and insist that 5000 people are in the pool because everyone is so smart and all their kids friends are allegedly 99th percentile. I would be willing to bet that pool is no more than 1000 kids county wide, but then again I apparently have a better understanding of stats than most posters.

That DP, again. You are allowing your understanding of stats at the level of numbers alone blind you to the underlying paradigm, of which you might be unaware. MCPS provided the 85th-percentile national algorithm (though not the full algorithm for all individual adjustments, like EML/ESOL, 504, IEP, etc. -- they just lumped that in with language saying there were adjustments, but not what those adjustments were) in its 2022 response to the MCCPTA's GEC. Here's how it works, as far as they've allowed detail:

5th graders countywide take the fall MAP-M. Those numbers are reported to MCPS AEI & DCCAPS, which then look at the national norms (2020 norms are the latest from NWEA) to see what percentage, across the county met/exceeded the 85th percentile nationally. This number is significantly in excess of 15% of the MCPS 5th grade population (despite its faults, MCPS gets better standardized results than most of the country).

Then they separate the schools into 5 tranches based on FARMS rate (high, moderate high, moderate, moderate low, low). For each tranche, a score is identified which was met/exceeded by the same (or as close as possible) percentage of students from that tranche as those across the county met/exceeded the 85th national %ile (see above). That becomes the "locally-normed" 85th %ile score (cutoff for magnet lottery) for all the schools in that tranche.

If, say, 30% of MCPS students hit/exceeded the 85th national %ile, then only the top 30% of scores from low-FARMS schools would qualify (given that grade & reading level criteria are also met), but also the top 30% of scores from high-FARMS schools would qualify. The score that yields that 30% may be 96th %ile nationally for low-FARMS MCPS schools, but 60th %ile nationally for high-FARMS MCPS schools, with scores for the other tranches presumably falling somewhere in between. MCPS, to my knowledge, did not provide the tranche breakdown for this past year.

Of course, there are those pesky unknown adjustments for EML/ESOL and the like...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

Why should Frost be so special? Are there different supports/options available to students at Frost & Frost feeders, or is it just monied families facilitating via outside enrichment?

Many of the feeders offer acceleration unavailable elsewhere. Also, seems like the community is more interested in this and tends to invest more heavily in outside enrichment at RSM or AoPS. Not to mention many of the stronger Frost students would've been at TPMS before the lottery, but aren't selected because lotteries are random.

Frost beating TPMS was before the lottery, however. It was during local norming only.

Which I said two pages ago but no one wants facts to get in the way.

Frost did beat TPMS that year in one contest but if I remember correctly a few months later was trounced by TPMS at the state level.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

The bigger question is WHY is the bar set so low? They know how many magnet seats there are (a couple hundred) and they know that if they set the lottery threshold at the (locally normed) 85th percentile they will end up with thousands of names in the lottery. Just how many we don’t actually know because for some reason they are super secretive about this for no good reason even though they are supposed to publish this data. Let’s guess it’s 5,000. Why are we setting the bar at the 85th percentile when we could be setting it at the 90th or 95th percentile and still have plenty of universally screened students in the lottery enough to yield fully filled seats? If the argument is that all those kids could do the work, then why are we even having this super small specialized program if you have many thousands of students who should have their identified needs met with similarly challenging courses throughout the county?

Oh wow. Perhaps we need some basic math classes for parents! There are about 10-11k students in most grade levels in MCPS. The top 15 percent get into the lottery if the 85 percent threshold hasn’t changed (and it definitely hasn’t gone down), but only if they meet the other criteria which includes As in the relevant subjects. 15 percent of 10k is not 5,000! It’s 1500, so somewhere less than 1500 is the universe of kids who got into the lottery. Judging by how much the eastern waitlist moved for example, I’d guess the number is much much lower than that.

85 %ile national. MCPS students, as a whole, score considerably higher than the national average -- the distribution shifts to the right. It may not be half the MCPS population that scores 85th or above, but it is a great deal more than 15 percent.

No. You are wrong. It’s 85th percentile LOCAL. Which means the top 15 percent are in the lottery. Anyone who knows anything about this knows they use 85 percent local which translates into 95 percent national or so in some schools and 70 percent in others.

This is absolutely correct. I know several kids with scores in the 85-93 range who were not in the key because their local percentile was way beyond the cut off. One parent I know sprayed and learned that her kid’s 88% was 65% in MCPS.

While that is true, the other poster is actually more correct. There are a lot of kids in mcps who score in the tippy top percentiles (99, 98, 97). Even with local norming manipulating the scores, if you have 25 kids in a school who have these scores, they all still get into the pool even if there’s only 90 kids in the grade. It ends up being more than a straight top 15 percent.

Oh come on. Do you really not understand percentiles???? It staggers me how posters on this forum fail to understand basic math but advocate for their kids to be in all the advanced classes. The fact is that the top 15 percent in each of the groupings (schools grouped by poverty level) gets in to the pool. Where there are lots of kids at the top of the range, people at the bottom don’t get in. That’s why the national cut off isn’t 85 but 92 or 93 for lower poverty schools. No the other poster is not “more” correct. The top 15 percent is the top 15 percent. If everyone got 99th percentile nationally then the kids that got in would be the top 15 percent of that group (eg those scoring 99.85 percent and above).

It’s amazing that so many supposedly intelligent people can’t grasp this and insist that 5000 people are in the pool because everyone is so smart and all their kids friends are allegedly 99th percentile. I would be willing to bet that pool is no more than 1000 kids county wide, but then again I apparently have a better understanding of stats than most posters.

That DP, again. You are allowing your understanding of stats at the level of numbers alone blind you to the underlying paradigm, of which you might be unaware. MCPS provided the 85th-percentile national algorithm (though not the full algorithm for all individual adjustments, like EML/ESOL, 504, IEP, etc. -- they just lumped that in with language saying there were adjustments, but not what those adjustments were) in its 2022 response to the MCCPTA's GEC. Here's how it works, as far as they've allowed detail:

5th graders countywide take the fall MAP-M. Those numbers are reported to MCPS AEI & DCCAPS, which then look at the national norms (2020 norms are the latest from NWEA) to see what percentage, across the county met/exceeded the 85th percentile nationally. This number is significantly in excess of 15% of the MCPS 5th grade population (despite its faults, MCPS gets better standardized results than most of the country).

Then they separate the schools into 5 tranches based on FARMS rate (high, moderate high, moderate, moderate low, low). For each tranche, a score is identified which was met/exceeded by the same (or as close as possible) percentage of students from that tranche as those across the county met/exceeded the 85th national %ile (see above). That becomes the "locally-normed" 85th %ile score (cutoff for magnet lottery) for all the schools in that tranche.

If, say, 30% of MCPS students hit/exceeded the 85th national %ile, then only the top 30% of scores from low-FARMS schools would qualify (given that grade & reading level criteria are also met), but also the top 30% of scores from high-FARMS schools would qualify. The score that yields that 30% may be 96th %ile nationally for low-FARMS MCPS schools, but 60th %ile nationally for high-FARMS MCPS schools, with scores for the other tranches presumably falling somewhere in between. MCPS, to my knowledge, did not provide the tranche breakdown for this past year.

Of course, there are those pesky unknown adjustments for EML/ESOL and the like...

You, I like.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

The bigger question is WHY is the bar set so low? They know how many magnet seats there are (a couple hundred) and they know that if they set the lottery threshold at the (locally normed) 85th percentile they will end up with thousands of names in the lottery. Just how many we don’t actually know because for some reason they are super secretive about this for no good reason even though they are supposed to publish this data. Let’s guess it’s 5,000. Why are we setting the bar at the 85th percentile when we could be setting it at the 90th or 95th percentile and still have plenty of universally screened students in the lottery enough to yield fully filled seats? If the argument is that all those kids could do the work, then why are we even having this super small specialized program if you have many thousands of students who should have their identified needs met with similarly challenging courses throughout the county?

Oh wow. Perhaps we need some basic math classes for parents! There are about 10-11k students in most grade levels in MCPS. The top 15 percent get into the lottery if the 85 percent threshold hasn’t changed (and it definitely hasn’t gone down), but only if they meet the other criteria which includes As in the relevant subjects. 15 percent of 10k is not 5,000! It’s 1500, so somewhere less than 1500 is the universe of kids who got into the lottery. Judging by how much the eastern waitlist moved for example, I’d guess the number is much much lower than that.

85 %ile national. MCPS students, as a whole, score considerably higher than the national average -- the distribution shifts to the right. It may not be half the MCPS population that scores 85th or above, but it is a great deal more than 15 percent.

No. You are wrong. It’s 85th percentile LOCAL. Which means the top 15 percent are in the lottery. Anyone who knows anything about this knows they use 85 percent local which translates into 95 percent national or so in some schools and 70 percent in others.

This is absolutely correct. I know several kids with scores in the 85-93 range who were not in the key because their local percentile was way beyond the cut off. One parent I know sprayed and learned that her kid’s 88% was 65% in MCPS.

While that is true, the other poster is actually more correct. There are a lot of kids in mcps who score in the tippy top percentiles (99, 98, 97). Even with local norming manipulating the scores, if you have 25 kids in a school who have these scores, they all still get into the pool even if there’s only 90 kids in the grade. It ends up being more than a straight top 15 percent.

Oh come on. Do you really not understand percentiles???? It staggers me how posters on this forum fail to understand basic math but advocate for their kids to be in all the advanced classes. The fact is that the top 15 percent in each of the groupings (schools grouped by poverty level) gets in to the pool. Where there are lots of kids at the top of the range, people at the bottom don’t get in. That’s why the national cut off isn’t 85 but 92 or 93 for lower poverty schools. No the other poster is not “more” correct. The top 15 percent is the top 15 percent. If everyone got 99th percentile nationally then the kids that got in would be the top 15 percent of that group (eg those scoring 99.85 percent and above).

It’s amazing that so many supposedly intelligent people can’t grasp this and insist that 5000 people are in the pool because everyone is so smart and all their kids friends are allegedly 99th percentile. I would be willing to bet that pool is no more than 1000 kids county wide, but then again I apparently have a better understanding of stats than most posters.

And loads of humility. Truth is, there is an actual concrete number of kids in the pool. Why MCPS chooses to keep this top secret is unclear.

Well they haven’t really, have they? They’ve clearly said top 15% in the county and anyone can work out what that number is. Then there are other criteria re grades that make that number smaller. I don’t know why there are always claims that it’s not transparent because there’s plenty of info out there on what the criteria is.

And yet, you’re just guessing at the number. As am I. Because if MCPS were actually transparent, this data would be published publicly as it used to be. Someone made a decision to stop publishing this info and AEI won’t answer the question when asked. Feel free to make more excuses and say they’re transparent.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

Why should Frost be so special? Are there different supports/options available to students at Frost & Frost feeders, or is it just monied families facilitating via outside enrichment?

Many of the feeders offer acceleration unavailable elsewhere. Also, seems like the community is more interested in this and tends to invest more heavily in outside enrichment at RSM or AoPS. Not to mention many of the stronger Frost students would've been at TPMS before the lottery, but aren't selected because lotteries are random.

Frost beating TPMS was before the lottery, however. It was during local norming only.

Which I said two pages ago but no one wants facts to get in the way.

Frost did beat TPMS that year in one contest but if I remember correctly a few months later was trounced by TPMS at the state level.

It's also just such a weird metric. Competition math is not something that anyone achieves based solely on coursework, no matter whether they are at Frost or TPMS or anywhere else. It doesn't tell us anything about the access these kids have to a school curriculum any more than whether one soccer team dominates.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

Why should Frost be so special? Are there different supports/options available to students at Frost & Frost feeders, or is it just monied families facilitating via outside enrichment?

Many of the feeders offer acceleration unavailable elsewhere. Also, seems like the community is more interested in this and tends to invest more heavily in outside enrichment at RSM or AoPS. Not to mention many of the stronger Frost students would've been at TPMS before the lottery, but aren't selected because lotteries are random.

The community investing heavily is fine. The stronger students forming a good local cohort is fine. The feeders offering acceleration unavailable elsewhere absolutley is not fine. The system shouldn't support resource hoarding. It should ensure equivalent access.

I wonder how many teachers would be qualified to teach these accelerated classes

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

The bigger question is WHY is the bar set so low? They know how many magnet seats there are (a couple hundred) and they know that if they set the lottery threshold at the (locally normed) 85th percentile they will end up with thousands of names in the lottery. Just how many we don’t actually know because for some reason they are super secretive about this for no good reason even though they are supposed to publish this data. Let’s guess it’s 5,000. Why are we setting the bar at the 85th percentile when we could be setting it at the 90th or 95th percentile and still have plenty of universally screened students in the lottery enough to yield fully filled seats? If the argument is that all those kids could do the work, then why are we even having this super small specialized program if you have many thousands of students who should have their identified needs met with similarly challenging courses throughout the county?

Oh wow. Perhaps we need some basic math classes for parents! There are about 10-11k students in most grade levels in MCPS. The top 15 percent get into the lottery if the 85 percent threshold hasn’t changed (and it definitely hasn’t gone down), but only if they meet the other criteria which includes As in the relevant subjects. 15 percent of 10k is not 5,000! It’s 1500, so somewhere less than 1500 is the universe of kids who got into the lottery. Judging by how much the eastern waitlist moved for example, I’d guess the number is much much lower than that.

85 %ile national. MCPS students, as a whole, score considerably higher than the national average -- the distribution shifts to the right. It may not be half the MCPS population that scores 85th or above, but it is a great deal more than 15 percent.

No. 85th percentile locally normed. -DP

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

Why should Frost be so special? Are there different supports/options available to students at Frost & Frost feeders, or is it just monied families facilitating via outside enrichment?

Many of the feeders offer acceleration unavailable elsewhere. Also, seems like the community is more interested in this and tends to invest more heavily in outside enrichment at RSM or AoPS. Not to mention many of the stronger Frost students would've been at TPMS before the lottery, but aren't selected because lotteries are random.

The community investing heavily is fine. The stronger students forming a good local cohort is fine. The feeders offering acceleration unavailable elsewhere absolutley is not fine. The system shouldn't support resource hoarding. It should ensure equivalent access.

I wonder how many teachers would be qualified to teach these accelerated classes

From the perspective of the elementary and early middle acceleration that is the subject, here, the answer is many. The accelerated course curriculula are provided, as is teacher training.

Even if it weren't many, though, is there a reason that students from Frost feeders should have access that others within the same public school system do not? Or should we be enabling resource & opportunity hoarding from public funds and with what should be a public good?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

The bigger question is WHY is the bar set so low? They know how many magnet seats there are (a couple hundred) and they know that if they set the lottery threshold at the (locally normed) 85th percentile they will end up with thousands of names in the lottery. Just how many we don’t actually know because for some reason they are super secretive about this for no good reason even though they are supposed to publish this data. Let’s guess it’s 5,000. Why are we setting the bar at the 85th percentile when we could be setting it at the 90th or 95th percentile and still have plenty of universally screened students in the lottery enough to yield fully filled seats? If the argument is that all those kids could do the work, then why are we even having this super small specialized program if you have many thousands of students who should have their identified needs met with similarly challenging courses throughout the county?

Oh wow. Perhaps we need some basic math classes for parents! There are about 10-11k students in most grade levels in MCPS. The top 15 percent get into the lottery if the 85 percent threshold hasn’t changed (and it definitely hasn’t gone down), but only if they meet the other criteria which includes As in the relevant subjects. 15 percent of 10k is not 5,000! It’s 1500, so somewhere less than 1500 is the universe of kids who got into the lottery. Judging by how much the eastern waitlist moved for example, I’d guess the number is much much lower than that.

85 %ile national. MCPS students, as a whole, score considerably higher than the national average -- the distribution shifts to the right. It may not be half the MCPS population that scores 85th or above, but it is a great deal more than 15 percent.

No. 85th percentile locally normed. -DP

Good grief.

Target cutoff is 85th national percentile from NWEA 2020 tables, with local norming by FARMS tranche, resulting in different actual cutoffs across individual ESs, but not the top 15% from each school, with the percentage being greater, in general (though not always for each school, because of the tranched pooling of candidacy), than 15% because MCPS students score higher, in general, than US students as a whole.

Read the post 6 above the one you just wrote, here, for the explanation of what all that means.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

The bigger question is WHY is the bar set so low? They know how many magnet seats there are (a couple hundred) and they know that if they set the lottery threshold at the (locally normed) 85th percentile they will end up with thousands of names in the lottery. Just how many we don’t actually know because for some reason they are super secretive about this for no good reason even though they are supposed to publish this data. Let’s guess it’s 5,000. Why are we setting the bar at the 85th percentile when we could be setting it at the 90th or 95th percentile and still have plenty of universally screened students in the lottery enough to yield fully filled seats? If the argument is that all those kids could do the work, then why are we even having this super small specialized program if you have many thousands of students who should have their identified needs met with similarly challenging courses throughout the county?

Oh wow. Perhaps we need some basic math classes for parents! There are about 10-11k students in most grade levels in MCPS. The top 15 percent get into the lottery if the 85 percent threshold hasn’t changed (and it definitely hasn’t gone down), but only if they meet the other criteria which includes As in the relevant subjects. 15 percent of 10k is not 5,000! It’s 1500, so somewhere less than 1500 is the universe of kids who got into the lottery. Judging by how much the eastern waitlist moved for example, I’d guess the number is much much lower than that.

85 %ile national. MCPS students, as a whole, score considerably higher than the national average -- the distribution shifts to the right. It may not be half the MCPS population that scores 85th or above, but it is a great deal more than 15 percent.

No. 85th percentile locally normed. -DP

Good grief.

Target cutoff is 85th national percentile from NWEA 2020 tables, with local norming by FARMS tranche, resulting in different actual cutoffs across individual ESs, but not the top 15% from each school, with the percentage being greater, in general (though not always for each school, because of the tranched pooling of candidacy), than 15% because MCPS students score higher, in general, than US students as a whole.

Read the post 6 above the one you just wrote, here, for the explanation of what all that means.

Of course, the MAP-based (no CogAT) selection paradigm is supposed to be being reviewed for any change now that they've got 3 years of (somewhat) similar data. MCPS had "promised" the BOE that it would use the MAP approach for at least three years, refusing other suggested adjustments in the interim, even though their own paradigm shifted significantly between the first and second year, from more of an any-of-these-criteria-may-be-met-for-lottery-pool-inclusion basis to an all-of-these-must-be-met basis.

So...MCPS could be changing things this year, but to what, and including which measures, we do not know.

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Anonymous wrote:Is COGAT going to be required for any other gradess this year?

These gatekeeping tests have fallen out of favor since they are inequitable.

I don’t really see how the Cogat is inequitable. It’s not based on concepts taught. Vast majority of kids have never seen it before/prepped in any way. It measures cognitive aptitude and reasoning skills. It’s actually a much better tool than the MAP, which in my opinion is a good test but could be seen as inequitable since scores can be improved based on early access to more advanced concepts.

True. The majority have never seen it or prepped.

But those that had seen it and prepped were getting a lot of admissions.

With just a few tutoring sessions to practice this test my kid's score improved by 20%. It only cost me a few hundred bucks.

I would say something, but will wait so see the results in a few years so that no one will argue with how badly MCPS messed up the GT program and magnet feeders.

Suffice to say that when MCPS threw out the CoGAT (a race-neutral, nationally-administered test), I believe they were no longer selecting the best-of-the-best anymore. Thankfully there were a lot of private companies willing to pick up that slack. The parents and students that realized this have a distinct advantage over those that didn't.

There were already signs when (I believe it was Frost?) beat TPMS in math competitions? Let's see how HS turns out for those kids.

Ok, let me repeat this as I have many times in other threads because you don’t seem to be able to get this straight: LAST YEAR’S 8th GRADERS WERE SELECTED USING COGAT. I don’t know when Frost allegedly beat TPMS in math competitions but it certainly wasn’t this year and any year prior to this year some or all of the students were selected using COGAT.

High school is turning out pretty well for my kid who was selected for TPMS using COGAT and is in the Blair magnet. I expect it will also turn out pretty well for their sibling who was selected for the TPMS magnet using the lottery.

That's not true.

Last year's 8th Graders within the TPMS magnet program were selected in their 5th grade using "MCPS Percentile."

YES IT IS TRUE!! FFS! I am the parent of one of those 8th graders and they took the Cogat in fall 2019 (pretty sure it was November, results came out in January) and it was used for the selection into the magnet program for the 2020-2021 year. I have the paperwork for Cogat results and the offer of a place. My kid’s Cogat scores were all 99th percentile both locally and nationally. Fall 2019 was the last time that Cogat was used for entry to the middle school magnets.

Please stop lying and spreading misinformation. If you don’t know fine, but some of us do and there is no wiggle room or space for interpretation here. It’s fact that Cogat was used in 2019 for the 2020-2021 school year.

So, everyone is a little bit correct. You have to go back in time to understand this debate. This year's 11th graders are the first class that went through "universal selection," which dropped the "opt in" testing that happened on a Saturday, and dropped the separate STEM and Humanities tests. It also dropped the at-home essay and introduced locally normed scores. So, the takeaway was that the top kids from each "tier" were being selected but anecdotal data suggests that those kids were all still above about the 95th percentile nationally.

When MCPS made this change, they ALSO promised that the kids who were identified as "highly able" but were not admitted under the new system would be offered an equivalent education at their home schools with a "peer cohort." That's the year they rolled out HIGH and AIM. Now, implementation of those classes was spotty, with some schools not offering them at all, and others offering them to everyone.

So, that's this year's 11th graders. That's also the cohort in which Frost beat TPMS at a math competition once and Frost parents haven't stopped talking about it since. To me, the Frost victory was proof that the system was working - highly able kids were still excelling at their home school. We can now see that those kids did well in high school admissions as well. This year's 9th, 10th, and 11th graders all seem to have landed well even though they came in after universal screening.

That system held up through this year's 8th graders, when MCPS switched to a lottery for a locally normed top 85%. It should be noted that the lottery came about partially as a result of a lawsuit filed by some Potomac parents. They were so worked up about universal screening that they filed a suit that led directly to the new system.

Basically, as a parent with kids who have gone through all three iterations of this process, I think the "middle" option was best but people lost their everloving minds over that one so now we have a much worse system with the bar set far too low.

The bigger question is WHY is the bar set so low? They know how many magnet seats there are (a couple hundred) and they know that if they set the lottery threshold at the (locally normed) 85th percentile they will end up with thousands of names in the lottery. Just how many we don’t actually know because for some reason they are super secretive about this for no good reason even though they are supposed to publish this data. Let’s guess it’s 5,000. Why are we setting the bar at the 85th percentile when we could be setting it at the 90th or 95th percentile and still have plenty of universally screened students in the lottery enough to yield fully filled seats? If the argument is that all those kids could do the work, then why are we even having this super small specialized program if you have many thousands of students who should have their identified needs met with similarly challenging courses throughout the county?

Oh wow. Perhaps we need some basic math classes for parents! There are about 10-11k students in most grade levels in MCPS. The top 15 percent get into the lottery if the 85 percent threshold hasn’t changed (and it definitely hasn’t gone down), but only if they meet the other criteria which includes As in the relevant subjects. 15 percent of 10k is not 5,000! It’s 1500, so somewhere less than 1500 is the universe of kids who got into the lottery. Judging by how much the eastern waitlist moved for example, I’d guess the number is much much lower than that.

85 %ile national. MCPS students, as a whole, score considerably higher than the national average -- the distribution shifts to the right. It may not be half the MCPS population that scores 85th or above, but it is a great deal more than 15 percent.

No. 85th percentile locally normed. -DP

Good grief.

Target cutoff is 85th national percentile from NWEA 2020 tables, with local norming by FARMS tranche, resulting in different actual cutoffs across individual ESs, but not the top 15% from each school, with the percentage being greater, in general (though not always for each school, because of the tranched pooling of candidacy), than 15% because MCPS students score higher, in general, than US students as a whole.

Read the post 6 above the one you just wrote, here, for the explanation of what all that means.

DP. I appreciate your information. But I don't think many of these posters understand the words coming out of your mouth--what you've described involves many steps and they will not understand no matter how many times you try to rephrase.

So basically you're saying right now MCPS sees what % of MCPS students met the 85 percentile 2020 national norm. For example, 30% of MCPS students met the 85 percentile national norm. Then they apply this percentage to each of the 5 SES groups. So in this example, they'd put the top 30% of each SES group in the lottery. The score cutoff for each SES group will vary widely.

I would've thought the local norming process would just mean that MCPS would take the top 15 percentile from each SES group. I don't understand why they'd widen the band.