Is CogAT gone forever?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all.

And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced.

By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program.

Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping.

Nationally-normed exams are just that. If it was so easy to ace spatial relationships, word relationships, etc, then kids all over the country would be making perfect scores.

But, if you think it's true, have MCPS offer a CoGAT "prep" class for all kids at MCPS and see for yourself if it matters. If what you're saying is true, then you should have a whole grade of perfect scores, correct?

But you know very well you can't coach a kid who can't see spatial relationships or understand word relationships overnight. It's easier to coach MAP (which only measures a kid on grade-level materials), and that's what MCPS is doing - rewarding kids with the resources for tutoring.

Shame on you,

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all.

And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced.

By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program.

Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping.

Nationally-normed exams are just that. If it was so easy to ace spatial relationships, word relationships, etc, then kids all over the country would be making perfect scores.

But, if you think it's true, have MCPS offer a CoGAT "prep" class for all kids at MCPS and see for yourself if it matters. If what you're saying is true, then you should have a whole grade of perfect scores, correct?

But you know very well you can't coach a kid who can't see spatial relationships or understand word relationships overnight. It's easier to coach MAP (which only measures a kid on grade-level materials), and that's what MCPS is doing - rewarding kids with the resources for tutoring.

Shame on you,

If it's so easy to take teach a kid higher grade level math, why doesn't MCPS do that?

No, really, why not? That's what we've been begging for for years.

[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. 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.

FARMS rate school groupings, of course, and with the unknown of those individual adjustments (e.g., ESOL/EML), but you're right and have made it more approchable.

I think the net was cast wide in that first year to catch as many as possible who might have been considered under normal circumstances, but whose different experiences under remote learning was presumed to result in highly variable scores. Once they chose the 85th %ile marker, it was hard to walk that back, but they used the more subtle change of any-of-these criteria to all-of-these criteria to tighten things a bit the next two years.

The more disturbing thing is the implicit acknowledgement that many, many more students could benefit from magnet-type programming, without creating the spaces to fulfill that, even if delivered at the local school instead of the magnet. Even if distributing magnet opportunities across SESs, and using local norms to do so, is the right approach, it's hard to see how a student hitting the 94th %ile nationally at the beginning of 5th grade, which is better than over half of 8th-graders nationally at the end of the academic year, isn't considered ready for AIM/AMP7+, the classes in 6th grade that would start by covering 7th-grade material and go through 8th grade material in preparation for Algebra in 7th, solely because they come from a low-FARMS school.

What are you referring to? What low-FARM middle schools don't offer AIM/7+ in 6th?

[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. 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.

FARMS rate school groupings, of course, and with the unknown of those individual adjustments (e.g., ESOL/EML), but you're right and have made it more approchable.

I think the net was cast wide in that first year to catch as many as possible who might have been considered under normal circumstances, but whose different experiences under remote learning was presumed to result in highly variable scores. Once they chose the 85th %ile marker, it was hard to walk that back, but they used the more subtle change of any-of-these criteria to all-of-these criteria to tighten things a bit the next two years.

The more disturbing thing is the implicit acknowledgement that many, many more students could benefit from magnet-type programming, without creating the spaces to fulfill that, even if delivered at the local school instead of the magnet. Even if distributing magnet opportunities across SESs, and using local norms to do so, is the right approach, it's hard to see how a student hitting the 94th %ile nationally at the beginning of 5th grade, which is better than over half of 8th-graders nationally at the end of the academic year, isn't considered ready for AIM/AMP7+, the classes in 6th grade that would start by covering 7th-grade material and go through 8th grade material in preparation for Algebra in 7th, solely because they come from a low-FARMS school.

What are you referring to? What low-FARM middle schools don't offer AIM/7+ in 6th?

It's not that the schools don't offer the class. It's that the central placement in that class goes by inclusion in the magnet lottery -- if you are identified for the lottery, you're guaranteed placement, if not, you'll be placed in a lower class, being upshifted by the local school admin if there is room and if the local school admin is amenable to such shifts.

The local norming of test scores by FARMS rate may make sense from the perspective of ensuring access to the magnet, even if the overall rubric is crude, at best. However, the above means MCPS is not ensuring a local-school 6th-grade spot in AIM/AMP7+ to a child having completed Math 5/6 with flying colors, but scoring "only" in the 94th %ile nationally on MAP-M at the start of their 5th-grade year (plenty high to indicate readiness for 7th- & 8th-grade material -- again, better than half of the 8th-graders in the US).

This happens because the local norming for the low-FARMS schools identifies the litmus score as that met or exceeded by the same percentage of students from all MCPS low-FARMS schools as the percentage of the whole of MCPS 5th-graders (regardless of school FARMS-rate tranche) who met or exceeded the 85th %ile nationally. Since so many at low-FARMS schools do so well on the test, the cutoff for them is at a very high score -- above that 94th national %ile.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all.

And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced.

By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program.

Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping.

Exactly, when my kids were applying to these special programs, I hired a CogAT tutor. It got their scores up by 25%. They breezed right into the mangets. I think that's why so many people want these tests back because they're so easily gamed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all.

And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced.

By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program.

Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping.

Exactly, when my kids were applying to these special programs, I hired a CogAT tutor. It got their scores up by 25%. They breezed right into the mangets. I think that's why so many people want these tests back because they're so easily gamed.

+1 CogAT is both an ability and an exposure test, contrary to what a PP claims. People with more resources can hire the best tutors.

On a related note, I don’t understand why MCPS keeps trying to forcibly diversify by lowering the bar, which denies opportunity for some top performing students.

Parents and students decide where to spend their time and money. Some choose to focus completely on athletics, doing expensive travel teams and then breezing through tryouts to public school athletic teams. Many cannot afford expensive travel teams, and some public school varsity teams are not diverse. Yet the bar is not lowered (via lowering standards and having a lottery) to diversify the public school varsity teams despite the unfairness and inequity. Both athletics and academics are based on ability, yet why is it that MCPS is only focusing equity efforts on academics, and not athletics? Both are financed by the public.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all.

And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced.

By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program.

Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping.

Exactly, when my kids were applying to these special programs, I hired a CogAT tutor. It got their scores up by 25%. They breezed right into the mangets. I think that's why so many people want these tests back because they're so easily gamed.

Are you the same poster who said essentially the same thing 8 pages back referencing CogAT prep for TJ (Fairfax County)?

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/15/1152067.page

Look, the issue is a failure of MCPS to do a reasonably good job identifying ability (whether for GT designation or magnet admission/advanced class assignment), given the tools that they could (and did, not so long ago) employ. The tools they do use (e.g., MAP) are far more gameable than tools like CogAT. Those tools used also don't evidence underlying capability to the degree a tool like CogAT would. The paradigm they've kept, then, more significantly advantages those of means (including those coming from private school, as they then are allowed additional ways to test in), flying in the face of the equity aims espoused by MCPS leadership & the BOE.

The answer doesn't have to be CogAT, but it shouldn't be what they've adopted. Even if they couldn't identify an alternate ability measure that better resisted being gamed, including CogAT with a robust heuristic would beat the current approach hands down.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all.

And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced.

By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program.

Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping.

Exactly, when my kids were applying to these special programs, I hired a CogAT tutor. It got their scores up by 25%. They breezed right into the mangets. I think that's why so many people want these tests back because they're so easily gamed.

Are you the same poster who said essentially the same thing 8 pages back referencing CogAT prep for TJ (Fairfax County)?

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/15/1152067.page

Look, the issue is a failure of MCPS to do a reasonably good job identifying ability (whether for GT designation or magnet admission/advanced class assignment), given the tools that they could (and did, not so long ago) employ. The tools they do use (e.g., MAP) are far more gameable than tools like CogAT. Those tools used also don't evidence underlying capability to the degree a tool like CogAT would. The paradigm they've kept, then, more significantly advantages those of means (including those coming from private school, as they then are allowed additional ways to test in), flying in the face of the equity aims espoused by MCPS leadership & the BOE.

The answer doesn't have to be CogAT, but it shouldn't be what they've adopted. Even if they couldn't identify an alternate ability measure that better resisted being gamed, including CogAT with a robust heuristic would beat the current approach hands down.

Could you point to data that makes you think including CogAT would beat the current approach?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all.

And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced.

By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program.

Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping.

Exactly, when my kids were applying to these special programs, I hired a CogAT tutor. It got their scores up by 25%. They breezed right into the mangets. I think that's why so many people want these tests back because they're so easily gamed.

Are you the same poster who said essentially the same thing 8 pages back referencing CogAT prep for TJ (Fairfax County)?

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/15/1152067.page

Look, the issue is a failure of MCPS to do a reasonably good job identifying ability (whether for GT designation or magnet admission/advanced class assignment), given the tools that they could (and did, not so long ago) employ. The tools they do use (e.g., MAP) are far more gameable than tools like CogAT. Those tools used also don't evidence underlying capability to the degree a tool like CogAT would. The paradigm they've kept, then, more significantly advantages those of means (including those coming from private school, as they then are allowed additional ways to test in), flying in the face of the equity aims espoused by MCPS leadership & the BOE.

The answer doesn't have to be CogAT, but it shouldn't be what they've adopted. Even if they couldn't identify an alternate ability measure that better resisted being gamed, including CogAT with a robust heuristic would beat the current approach hands down.

Could you point to data that makes you think including CogAT would beat the current approach?

My Larla got missed, so I know the system is screwed up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all.

And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced.

By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program.

Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping.

Exactly, when my kids were applying to these special programs, I hired a CogAT tutor. It got their scores up by 25%. They breezed right into the mangets. I think that's why so many people want these tests back because they're so easily gamed.

+1 CogAT is both an ability and an exposure test, contrary to what a PP claims. People with more resources can hire the best tutors.

On a related note, I don’t understand why MCPS keeps trying to forcibly diversify by lowering the bar, which denies opportunity for some top performing students.

Parents and students decide where to spend their time and money. Some choose to focus completely on athletics, doing expensive travel teams and then breezing through tryouts to public school athletic teams. Many cannot afford expensive travel teams, and some public school varsity teams are not diverse. Yet the bar is not lowered (via lowering standards and having a lottery) to diversify the public school varsity teams despite the unfairness and inequity. Both athletics and academics are based on ability, yet why is it that MCPS is only focusing equity efforts on academics, and not athletics? Both are financed by the public.

Varsity athletic teams are a game. Academics are important life skills. Kids can play free basketball and soccer to get the same benefits as varsity sports. The exception is college recruiting for sports, but the solution to that is to kill the sports recruiting.

[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. 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.

FARMS rate school groupings, of course, and with the unknown of those individual adjustments (e.g., ESOL/EML), but you're right and have made it more approchable.

I think the net was cast wide in that first year to catch as many as possible who might have been considered under normal circumstances, but whose different experiences under remote learning was presumed to result in highly variable scores. Once they chose the 85th %ile marker, it was hard to walk that back, but they used the more subtle change of any-of-these criteria to all-of-these criteria to tighten things a bit the next two years.

The more disturbing thing is the implicit acknowledgement that many, many more students could benefit from magnet-type programming, without creating the spaces to fulfill that, even if delivered at the local school instead of the magnet. Even if distributing magnet opportunities across SESs, and using local norms to do so, is the right approach, it's hard to see how a student hitting the 94th %ile nationally at the beginning of 5th grade, which is better than over half of 8th-graders nationally at the end of the academic year, isn't considered ready for AIM/AMP7+, the classes in 6th grade that would start by covering 7th-grade material and go through 8th grade material in preparation for Algebra in 7th, solely because they come from a low-FARMS school.

What are you referring to? What low-FARM middle schools don't offer AIM/7+ in 6th?

It's not that the schools don't offer the class. It's that the central placement in that class goes by inclusion in the magnet lottery -- if you are identified for the lottery, you're guaranteed placement, if not, you'll be placed in a lower class, being upshifted by the local school admin if there is room and if the local school admin is amenable to such shifts.

The local norming of test scores by FARMS rate may make sense from the perspective of ensuring access to the magnet, even if the overall rubric is crude, at best. However, the above means MCPS is not ensuring a local-school 6th-grade spot in AIM/AMP7+ to a child having completed Math 5/6 with flying colors, but scoring "only" in the 94th %ile nationally on MAP-M at the start of their 5th-grade year (plenty high to indicate readiness for 7th- & 8th-grade material -- again, better than half of the 8th-graders in the US).

This happens because the local norming for the low-FARMS schools identifies the litmus score as that met or exceeded by the same percentage of students from all MCPS low-FARMS schools as the percentage of the whole of MCPS 5th-graders (regardless of school FARMS-rate tranche) who met or exceeded the 85th %ile nationally. Since so many at low-FARMS schools do so well on the test, the cutoff for them is at a very high score -- above that 94th national %ile.

Do you know someone rejected a spot in AIM/7+ despite a high MAP score? My school used Spring 5th MAP and even Fall 6th MAP (switching after start of year) to place kids higher.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all.

And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced.

By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program.

Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping.

Exactly, when my kids were applying to these special programs, I hired a CogAT tutor. It got their scores up by 25%. They breezed right into the mangets. I think that's why so many people want these tests back because they're so easily gamed.

Are you the same poster who said essentially the same thing 8 pages back referencing CogAT prep for TJ (Fairfax County)?

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/15/1152067.page

Look, the issue is a failure of MCPS to do a reasonably good job identifying ability (whether for GT designation or magnet admission/advanced class assignment), given the tools that they could (and did, not so long ago) employ. The tools they do use (e.g., MAP) are far more gameable than tools like CogAT. Those tools used also don't evidence underlying capability to the degree a tool like CogAT would. The paradigm they've kept, then, more significantly advantages those of means (including those coming from private school, as they then are allowed additional ways to test in), flying in the face of the equity aims espoused by MCPS leadership & the BOE.

The answer doesn't have to be CogAT, but it shouldn't be what they've adopted. Even if they couldn't identify an alternate ability measure that better resisted being gamed, including CogAT with a robust heuristic would beat the current approach hands down.

Could you point to data that makes you think including CogAT would beat the current approach?

You first. Point to data showing that MAP adequately identifies ability exclusive of exposure.

[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:

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.

FARMS rate school groupings, of course, and with the unknown of those individual adjustments (e.g., ESOL/EML), but you're right and have made it more approchable.

I think the net was cast wide in that first year to catch as many as possible who might have been considered under normal circumstances, but whose different experiences under remote learning was presumed to result in highly variable scores. Once they chose the 85th %ile marker, it was hard to walk that back, but they used the more subtle change of any-of-these criteria to all-of-these criteria to tighten things a bit the next two years.

The more disturbing thing is the implicit acknowledgement that many, many more students could benefit from magnet-type programming, without creating the spaces to fulfill that, even if delivered at the local school instead of the magnet. Even if distributing magnet opportunities across SESs, and using local norms to do so, is the right approach, it's hard to see how a student hitting the 94th %ile nationally at the beginning of 5th grade, which is better than over half of 8th-graders nationally at the end of the academic year, isn't considered ready for AIM/AMP7+, the classes in 6th grade that would start by covering 7th-grade material and go through 8th grade material in preparation for Algebra in 7th, solely because they come from a low-FARMS school.

What are you referring to? What low-FARM middle schools don't offer AIM/7+ in 6th?

It's not that the schools don't offer the class. It's that the central placement in that class goes by inclusion in the magnet lottery -- if you are identified for the lottery, you're guaranteed placement, if not, you'll be placed in a lower class, being upshifted by the local school admin if there is room and if the local school admin is amenable to such shifts.

The local norming of test scores by FARMS rate may make sense from the perspective of ensuring access to the magnet, even if the overall rubric is crude, at best. However, the above means MCPS is not ensuring a local-school 6th-grade spot in AIM/AMP7+ to a child having completed Math 5/6 with flying colors, but scoring "only" in the 94th %ile nationally on MAP-M at the start of their 5th-grade year (plenty high to indicate readiness for 7th- & 8th-grade material -- again, better than half of the 8th-graders in the US).

This happens because the local norming for the low-FARMS schools identifies the litmus score as that met or exceeded by the same percentage of students from all MCPS low-FARMS schools as the percentage of the whole of MCPS 5th-graders (regardless of school FARMS-rate tranche) who met or exceeded the 85th %ile nationally. Since so many at low-FARMS schools do so well on the test, the cutoff for them is at a very high score -- above that 94th national %ile.

Do you know someone rejected a spot in AIM/7+ despite a high MAP score? My school used Spring 5th MAP and even Fall 6th MAP (switching after start of year) to place kids higher.

As noted, at least some schools do, based on seat availability and subject to the preference of the principal. But that doesn't mean all do so, or do so in the same way, or do so in a manner that ensures access to all who would benefit, and the criteria for non-central placement at each school is not available for review. Access within MCPS shouldn't be determined by the happenstance of one's zip code, no matter which parts of the SES spectrum are affected.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all.

And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced.

By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program.

Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping.

Exactly, when my kids were applying to these special programs, I hired a CogAT tutor. It got their scores up by 25%. They breezed right into the mangets. I think that's why so many people want these tests back because they're so easily gamed.

Are you the same poster who said essentially the same thing 8 pages back referencing CogAT prep for TJ (Fairfax County)?

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/15/1152067.page

Look, the issue is a failure of MCPS to do a reasonably good job identifying ability (whether for GT designation or magnet admission/advanced class assignment), given the tools that they could (and did, not so long ago) employ. The tools they do use (e.g., MAP) are far more gameable than tools like CogAT. Those tools used also don't evidence underlying capability to the degree a tool like CogAT would. The paradigm they've kept, then, more significantly advantages those of means (including those coming from private school, as they then are allowed additional ways to test in), flying in the face of the equity aims espoused by MCPS leadership & the BOE.

The answer doesn't have to be CogAT, but it shouldn't be what they've adopted. Even if they couldn't identify an alternate ability measure that better resisted being gamed, including CogAT with a robust heuristic would beat the current approach hands down.

I know! As long as it's prepable, and I can get my kids an advantage, I'm all for it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all.

And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced.

By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program.

Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping.

Exactly, when my kids were applying to these special programs, I hired a CogAT tutor. It got their scores up by 25%. They breezed right into the mangets. I think that's why so many people want these tests back because they're so easily gamed.

Are you the same poster who said essentially the same thing 8 pages back referencing CogAT prep for TJ (Fairfax County)?

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/15/1152067.page

Look, the issue is a failure of MCPS to do a reasonably good job identifying ability (whether for GT designation or magnet admission/advanced class assignment), given the tools that they could (and did, not so long ago) employ. The tools they do use (e.g., MAP) are far more gameable than tools like CogAT. Those tools used also don't evidence underlying capability to the degree a tool like CogAT would. The paradigm they've kept, then, more significantly advantages those of means (including those coming from private school, as they then are allowed additional ways to test in), flying in the face of the equity aims espoused by MCPS leadership & the BOE.

The answer doesn't have to be CogAT, but it shouldn't be what they've adopted. Even if they couldn't identify an alternate ability measure that better resisted being gamed, including CogAT with a robust heuristic would beat the current approach hands down.

I know! As long as it's prepable, and I can get my kids an advantage, I'm all for it.

I know! If I just respond enough times with strawman tripe, I can claim victory.

MAP is more preppable than CogAT and isn't, by itself, the right standardized testing tool for the job in the first place.