LGTFY you: Selective High Schools

[Anonymous]

If a kid is applying to McKinley/Banneker/Walls (and possibly a couple of private schools), does each recommendation letter have to be unique to the school or does the ELA and Math teacher letter cross school application boundaries?

[Anonymous]

Wild guess here: for the public school recommendations, if you ask a teacher for recommendations to multiple schools they are going to copy/paste. I don't know if private school letters are similar enough.

[Anonymous]

As a teacher who writes lots of recommendation letters I assume the teachers will use one letter for all applications. Imagine the seventh grade English teacher who has 40 kids ask for letters of recommendation. They aren’t writing multiple for one kid.

[Anonymous]

For DCPS selective high schools, you submit the teacher emails and they get a prompt from the lottery application website, so I assume the same recommendation goes to three schools, unless you give different teachers for different schools (Walls asks for English and Math, but you can choose either 7th or 8th grade teacher; Banneker asks for same, plus one admin; I don't know what McKinley asks for, we did not apply). It seems that these recommendations are not a paragraph of writing, the teachers are asking to rank student on specific parameters. This is I think where your kid will gain/lose an interview spot.

I assume private schools have their own separate process.

[Anonymous]

The selective high school rubrics are now up: https://enrolldcps.dc.gov/node/201

Walls and Banneker are substantially the same as last year.

The language in Walls' rubric is still as muddy as it ever was.

Banneker's is quite clear and, relatively speaking, their process seems to make good sense.

[Anonymous]

We're applying to publics and privates for HS. For the privates, Ravenna had us put in the teacher's email and select the schools to send the request to. That makes me think the one letter she writes will go to both schools we selected. The HS lottery hasn't opened yet so we'll see next month how that works.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We're applying to publics and privates for HS. For the privates, Ravenna had us put in the teacher's email and select the schools to send the request to. That makes me think the one letter she writes will go to both schools we selected. The HS lottery hasn't opened yet so we'll see next month how that works.

Sorry..."to send the recommendations to."

[Anonymous]

The new rubrics all say they will be in effect for two years. I guess DCUM isn’t the only one tired of Walls changing its admissions criteria every year.

[Anonymous]

Ok so for Walls.... must have a "top" GPA which I assume is like 3.2 or something, in order to have the recommendation letters even looked at.

Then some group of kids is invited to interview... weirdly it says "Top applicants based on GPA and recommendation letter review will be invited, along with their parent/guardian, for a panel interview. or participate in Q&A sessions with applicant ambassadors and/or PTO members. The interview panel consists of faculty, staff, and current applicants." So does this mean it's an interview OR a Q&A? And the interview panel includes current applicants, is it a group interview?

Typical DCPS making a hash of everything.

[Anonymous]

So 3.2 won’t get you into the pool. Only avoid outright rejection.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So 3.2 won’t get you into the pool. Only avoid outright rejection.

I made up 3.2, but yeah. If it's less than 3.0, don't bother applying. If it's not at least 3.5, chances are slim unless you have a really good reason. That's my understanding anyway.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So 3.2 won’t get you into the pool. Only avoid outright rejection.

I made up 3.2, but yeah. If it's less than 3.0, don't bother applying. If it's not at least 3.5, chances are slim unless you have a really good reason. That's my understanding anyway.

There’s no “good reason” exception to the GPA threshold at Walls. It’s a strict numerical cutoff unrelated to course rigor, typical grades at your middle school, personal situation, or anything else.

Also the cutoff has typically been around 3.7. It went up to nearly 4.0 for one year, and that’s when they introduced the teacher recommendations which allowed them to bring the cutoff back down (but with the new added wrinkle that now some 4.0 students don’t get interviews).