TJ blacklisted from T10?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm sure TJ will still have nice college admissions compared to most public high schools. If anything, with the admissions changes they'll have more minority students that top schools will be looking upon favorably to add diversity.

But clearly a lot of people there think they should waltz into T10 schools based on where they stood as 8th graders when they applied to TJ years earlier, and that's not how the world works.

TJ mostly number 1 high school in America for many year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:TJ admissions has been changed to eliminate merit criteria and admit based on skin color. It shouldn't be surprising if students are receiving C grades and find it challenging to secure admission to top-tier schools.

Nobody is wringing their hands over the C students who are being deferred. It is the A students who are wondering what the heck is happening.

Michigan today. We will see

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They can only accept so many kids from TJ. That’s why it’s not a good idea to go if you want to stay in state anyway.

My kid wasn’t interested in TJ, so no skin in the game. But, I guess why not? I understand wanting a diversity of student experiences as it relates to the bottom 95% of schools. But, if they had to apply to go to the best school in the state and are doing well there, why shouldn’t the best schools want to pick them up? That doesn’t make sense to me.

Because applicants are judged against their peers in high school. Why do so many people ignore this??? The average SAT at TJ is over 1500. A TJ student with a 1530 is seen as ordinary and maybe even a slacker. But a few mile away where the average SAT score is 1080 that student with a 1530 will been seen as special.

It really is that simple. TJ is a great school but if you are going hoping for a lottery ticket admission to CalTech MIT etc then your book smarts need to be augmented with some street smarts.

This is why C students end up in charge of everything. They sit back and put effort into things that actually pay off

Colleges know the TJ students are above average, and SAT score is 1530 is higher than 1500 no matter which school you attended. It is like why tech companies hire a lot from top cs schools. Colleges are the same thing they want to recruit the best students. Unless there is a hard data to compare it is hard to conclude student scoring 1530 at tj would not be admitted to CalTech or MIT those schools are hard to get it in but not it is because student is low ranking at tj.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They can only accept so many kids from TJ. That’s why it’s not a good idea to go if you want to stay in state anyway.

My kid wasn’t interested in TJ, so no skin in the game. But, I guess why not? I understand wanting a diversity of student experiences as it relates to the bottom 95% of schools. But, if they had to apply to go to the best school in the state and are doing well there, why shouldn’t the best schools want to pick them up? That doesn’t make sense to me.

Because applicants are judged against their peers in high school. Why do so many people ignore this??? The average SAT at TJ is over 1500. A TJ student with a 1530 is seen as ordinary and maybe even a slacker. But a few mile away where the average SAT score is 1080 that student with a 1530 will been seen as special.

It really is that simple. TJ is a great school but if you are going hoping for a lottery ticket admission to CalTech MIT etc then your book smarts need to be augmented with some street smarts.

This is why C students end up in charge of everything. They sit back and put effort into things that actually pay off

Colleges know the TJ students are above average, and SAT score is 1530 is higher than 1500 no matter which school you attended. It is like why tech companies hire a lot from top cs schools. Colleges are the same thing they want to recruit the best students. Unless there is a hard data to compare it is hard to conclude student scoring 1530 at tj would not be admitted to CalTech or MIT those schools are hard to get it in but not it is because student is low ranking at tj.

If 50 TJ students apply to CalTech and all of them are high stats (and they usually are all extremely high stats) CalTech still won't accept all of them.

Can you imagine what the news would say if CalTech accepted 50 students from TJ? No matter how great they are that would be bad press. The rest of America would be very, very upset.

[Anonymous]

TJ draws many of the best and the brightest from many of the schools in the area. Colleges do limit #s - I know this first hand - it's crappy they won't admit 20 sutdents to say harvard when admitting 20 students from across fairfax county wouldn't be as big a deal

[Anonymous]

Different schools have different admission policies, and it is certainly not true that all or even most Ivy League schools limit acceptance to a certain number of students from a particular school or locality. Many schools have certain requirements for a certain percentage of the student body and other requirements for other percentages of the student body, so, if a student isn’t among the best of the best, then perhaps they don’t make it in under the group for which they qualify.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They can only accept so many kids from TJ. That’s why it’s not a good idea to go if you want to stay in state anyway.

My kid wasn’t interested in TJ, so no skin in the game. But, I guess why not? I understand wanting a diversity of student experiences as it relates to the bottom 95% of schools. But, if they had to apply to go to the best school in the state and are doing well there, why shouldn’t the best schools want to pick them up? That doesn’t make sense to me.

Because applicants are judged against their peers in high school. Why do so many people ignore this??? The average SAT at TJ is over 1500. A TJ student with a 1530 is seen as ordinary and maybe even a slacker. But a few mile away where the average SAT score is 1080 that student with a 1530 will been seen as special.

It really is that simple. TJ is a great school but if you are going hoping for a lottery ticket admission to CalTech MIT etc then your book smarts need to be augmented with some street smarts.

This is why C students end up in charge of everything. They sit back and put effort into things that actually pay off

If they have Cs they aren’t putting effort into anything. They will be off to the community college.

This is why I love DCUM. A “C” student could get into 100 other colleges across the United States before going to NVCC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm sure TJ will still have nice college admissions compared to most public high schools. If anything, with the admissions changes they'll have more minority students that top schools will be looking upon favorably to add diversity.

But clearly a lot of people there think they should waltz into T10 schools based on where they stood as 8th graders when they applied to TJ years earlier, and that's not how the world works.

TJ mostly number 1 high school in America for many year.

Is this DCUM or a fortune cookie?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:TJ draws many of the best and the brightest from many of the schools in the area. Colleges do limit #s - I know this first hand - it's crappy they won't admit 20 sutdents to say harvard when admitting 20 students from across fairfax county wouldn't be as big a deal

It’s not crappy. Colleges shouldn’t assume kids who prepped or may have peaked in middle school are necessarily the best and the brightest.

[Anonymous]

No dog in this fight but only the top quarter of TJ students ever had a clean shot at T10 schools. I know it's hard to believe for some parents in this forum but there are lots of exceedingly smart students in FFX County alone who didn't get into TJ and are much more impressive than the majority of TJ students. Not to mention all the other amazing magnets around the country, valedictorians of thousands of schools, and all the children of VIPs from the U.S. and all over the world, very rich donors, athletes, and students at exclusive prep schools that send dozens of kids to a given Ivy....there are many many more appealing candidates than spots at top schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:TJ admissions has been changed to eliminate merit criteria and admit based on skin color. It shouldn't be surprising if students are receiving C grades and find it challenging to secure admission to top-tier schools.

Current seniors are the last class before the change in admissions so they are still the “old way”.

[Anonymous]

Where can you see this data for other FCPS high schools? Awesome stats to know about.

Anonymous wrote:I looked at this for the published matriculation data of graduating classes back in 2019 and then again in 2022.

TJ had about
- 8% HYPSM
- 6% next tier of privates (ranked 6-14)
- 20% public Top-4 (UVA, Mich, Cal, UCLA)
- 1% top SLACs/international
- 16% next tier of privates (15-25)
- 16% next tier of publics (6-15)
- 16% next tier of publics (16-25)
- 4% next tier of privates (26-55)
- 4% next tier of publics (26-50)
- 5% other VA publics or local schools
- 4% everything else

Compare to Mclean which was
- 1% HYPSM
- 2% next tier of privates (ranked 6-14)
- 11% public Top-4 (UVA, Mich, Cal, UCLA)
- 2% top SLACs/international
- 4% next tier of privates (15-25)
- 8% next tier of publics (6-15)
- 7% next tier of publics (16-25)
- 7% next tier of privates (26-55)
- 8% next tier of publics (26-50)
- 28% other VA publics or local schools
- 22% everything else

McLean has a larger percentage of graduating kids who were not listed and/or not attending college, so even though ~3% of those listed went to a top 14 private, that probably reflects closer to top ~2% of class... and also doesn't factor in hooks, which I suspect play a bigger role in aggregate for admitted McLean students than for admitted TJ students.

But hooks aside, if you drew the line at say top-15 publics and top 25 privates, at TJ you've got the top 2/3 of the class getting in, whereas at McLean it's the top 1/4. Definitely TJ isn't getting shunned historically. Hopefully they'll print matriculation again end-of-year for class of 2024 and we can see if the data has actually moved significantly in terms of where kids are matriculating to from our HS's... otherwise it's just anecdotes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They can only accept so many kids from TJ. That’s why it’s not a good idea to go if you want to stay in state anyway.

My kid wasn’t interested in TJ, so no skin in the game. But, I guess why not? I understand wanting a diversity of student experiences as it relates to the bottom 95% of schools. But, if they had to apply to go to the best school in the state and are doing well there, why shouldn’t the best schools want to pick them up? That doesn’t make sense to me.

Because applicants are judged against their peers in high school. Why do so many people ignore this??? The average SAT at TJ is over 1500. A TJ student with a 1530 is seen as ordinary and maybe even a slacker. But a few mile away where the average SAT score is 1080 that student with a 1530 will been seen as special.

It really is that simple. TJ is a great school but if you are going hoping for a lottery ticket admission to CalTech MIT etc then your book smarts need to be augmented with some street smarts.

This is why C students end up in charge of everything. They sit back and put effort into things that actually pay off

If they have Cs they aren’t putting effort into anything. They will be off to the community college.

This shows how ignorant you are.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:TJ draws many of the best and the brightest from many of the schools in the area. Colleges do limit #s - I know this first hand - it's crappy they won't admit 20 sutdents to say harvard when admitting 20 students from across fairfax county wouldn't be as big a deal

The college admissions are kept confidential (secret) for many reasons.

But it is laughable when some people here deny there are caps in admissions, such as the caps the state schools have on NOVA kids generally.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They can only accept so many kids from TJ. That’s why it’s not a good idea to go if you want to stay in state anyway.

My kid wasn’t interested in TJ, so no skin in the game. But, I guess why not? I understand wanting a diversity of student experiences as it relates to the bottom 95% of schools. But, if they had to apply to go to the best school in the state and are doing well there, why shouldn’t the best schools want to pick them up? That doesn’t make sense to me.

Because applicants are judged against their peers in high school. Why do so many people ignore this??? The average SAT at TJ is over 1500. A TJ student with a 1530 is seen as ordinary and maybe even a slacker. But a few mile away where the average SAT score is 1080 that student with a 1530 will been seen as special.

It really is that simple. TJ is a great school but if you are going hoping for a lottery ticket admission to CalTech MIT etc then your book smarts need to be augmented with some street smarts.

This is why C students end up in charge of everything. They sit back and put effort into things that actually pay off

If they have Cs they aren’t putting effort into anything. They will be off to the community college.

This is why I love DCUM. A “C” student could get into 100 other colleges across the United States before going to NVCC.

And there are a lot to C students who are athletes, donor kids or otherwise connected who will land in some of the schools that reject many A students. When I look back at my high school and college classmates who are now the most successful, they weren’t the top of the class and many were C students. They have exceptional judgment, savvy and people skills and, in some cases, are risk takers.

Earning top grades at top schools is generational a solid path to achieving UMC. But it’s not the only path and not even the best indicator of success. EQ counts for everything at the leadership level and many C students have EQ in spades.