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Anonymous wrote:It's amazing that people bought into the idea that a question and answer test for kids was uncrackable.
Ultimately the majority of the changes made to the admission process don't reflect a reaction to test prep for the QQ (1 of 3 tests in a multi-round process). This is just a distraction based on a handful of Facebook posts.
But, why crack the test? Is it to give an unfair advantage to kids whose parents can pay these businesses?
There is a market, and there will be solutions. Capitalism. Same way why people smuggle drugs or sell socks.
Some say Capitalism is immoral, that sounds like they are against capitalism. Instead, we should say Capitalism is devoid of morality. Supply and demand, like a machine.
So obtaining information by unethical means and selling it to families that can afford it so that their children will have an unfairly obtained advantage over other children from less well off and/or well educated families is okay because… capitalism.
All righty then. We now know what we need to know about the situation here.
it's unethical only because an ill-worded NDA that students have no choice but to sign. It's unethical because the company boasted the exam is un-preppable. HOLD MY BEER.
No, they didn’t “boast” that it was unpreppable. They produced an exam that was meant to be secure and took actions to make and keep it secure. It was an exam that gave the admissions office more information about the students because it showed how the students handled types of questions that they were unlikely to have seen before.
Apparently there are people in this world with no integrity who can’t stand the idea of their kids having to take a test on an even playing field with other kids so they figured out a way to “crack” the test so kids from well off families wouldn’t have to worry about competing with less well off kids who may be more intelligent than they are.
Adults should stay out of this process and let the school do its job.
This is exactly correct except for one thing - "let the school do its job". TJ doesn't have any say in either the development or the execution of the admissions process. FCPS does. And I'll repeat what I said earlier - the Quant-Q did its job for one year and we saw a significant increase in the number of Black, Hispanic, and low-income students in the first year of its implementation.
Its entire purpose what exactly what PP said - to evaluate how students would approach problems that they were unlikely to have seen before. I have seen several versions of the exam, and I can tell you that it is wonderful for achieving this purpose - but also that it would be a staggeringly easy exam for students who
had been shown how to do the problems beforehand.
Most exams evaluate how well you can apply a method for solving a problem and the idea behind the QQ was to evaluate your ability to
generate a method to solving a problem - that's the reason why it was intended to be secured. And Curie (and the books that are available on Amazon, and probably some other prep companies) destroyed what should have been an ideal exam for sussing out which students actually belong at TJ. I wish there were a way to go back to it - I was that impressed by it.
But we can't, because the golden goose has been slaughtered.
A bit of advice for TJ-aspirant families: the harder you work to crack the process for your kid, the more you incentivize FCPS to increase the apparent randomness and opacity of the process.
It didn't really have the desired effect. QuantQ made an impact but probably not a big enough impact to satisfy folks that wanted more equity. Before QuantQ 3% of the entering class was URM. The first year of QuantQ pushed that number up to 7%.
What you call "cracking the process" is usually referred to as studying in most places where effort is rewarded. I do think you have to be cautious about pushing your kid into the most competitive environment you can possibly squeak them into.
“Cracking the test” so that kids could know what the questions would be like in advance is in no way the same as “studying.”
Test takers are not supposed to have access to the types of questions in advance because part of the usefulness of the test is seeing how students handle new to them problems.
Having access to the types of problems in advance when the test is meant to be a secure instrument is unethical. In no way is it the same as “studying.”
Having access to the question format and question types is absolutely the same thing as studying.
Advertising a test as non-preppable is dishonest if it relies on noone ever discussing what the format of the test is. I mean every standardized test would be unpreppable if noone ever knew what the test looked like. How effective would an SAT class be if they didn't know reading comprehension, and analogies were going to be on the test?
Believing that a test's format remaining secret is naive. The test had a mild effect the first year it was administered but that was about it. Even if they came up witgh a new format every year, FCPS would have changed the admissions process because they were not concerned about the prepping, there is prepping going on right now. They were concerned about the race of the students.
The company that offers Quant-Q intentionally does NOT release materials to the public - it’s very different than SAT, ACT, etc.
1. They want to “measure your natural ability”.
"Remember that the goal of a critical thinking assessment is to measure your natural ability to think critically"
2. Test takers agreed to not share any parts of the test.
"Non-Disclosure and Non-Compete Agreement: The user agrees not to copy, disclose, describe, imitate, replicate, or mirror this interface or this instrument(s) in whole or in part for any purpose."
3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”
That stance walks on cultural thin ice:
1. Some will believe that it is unethical to reward "natural ability" independent of one's dedication to self-improvement through studying. The idea that there is a notion of independent "natural ability" that should be rewarded will be viewed as inherently supremicist thinking by some.
2. Requiring school kids to sign an NDA to take a test would be considered unethical by some, given than academia is inherently dedicated to the principle of sharing of information. Some might prefer to refuse to sign such an NDA on principle, but to do so would be impossible if the student values admission to TJ.
3. To someone who has studied psychology, it might seem a bit gauche that FCPS's response to feeling inadequate due to due an increasingly competitive applicant pool would be to start empathizing with supposed merit-based limitations of Blacks and Hispanics.
1. When you have doctors peppering the American medical field who can ace the MCATs but can't listen to a patient and accept that the way that their body is responding to treatment doesn't match what they learned in books... you start to understand why native problem-solving ability is so important in STEM.
2. Any person who genuinely deserves to go to TJ should be able to understand the concept of "this test will be less than worthless if kids come in already knowing how to do the problems, so don't share it". That's not the same as "Hey, the solution to this problem will help solve other problems for people, so you should share the solution!"
3. This statement is one of hundreds that ascribe this nebulous concept of "merit" exclusively to test-taking ability. When I am seeking to ascribe merit, I ask one simple question: What did you do with the resources you were provided? If child A gets a 90 on an admissions exam and benefited from boutique prep and a stable, economically sound home situation, and child B gets an 88 with no such supports, I'm selecting child B 100 times out of 100,
as is proper. But the moment you use a standardized exam as a data point, you invite bad actors to manipulate that data to suggest that "the bar for Asian students is unfairly higher", when in fact, the overwhelming majority of Asian applicants to TJ are not in disadvantaged economic situations and the preponderance of Black and Hispanic applicants are.
When you misuse data, you incentivize selective schools to take it away from you as a weapon to use.
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