Anonymous wrote:
You keep trying to make excuses for people lying and cheating. Now it’s the fault of the test company because they should have expected teenagers to lie? Come on.
Most of these kids probably wouldn’t have lied were it not for adults asking them to describe the copyrighted material. They wouldn’t have had any reason to if adults in their lives hadn’t fed them some of this twisted reasoning for why it’s fine to lie about promising not to disclose copyrighted information.
The test isn’t used anymore because it was compromised. And the fault for the compromising lies with the adults who convinced young teens that they didn’t need to honor the promise they signed when they sat down to take the test. It is not the fault of FCPS, the testing company, or the “culture.”
I feel sorry for kids who have families with plenty of money to spend on education but apparently not enough time to give thought what it means to be a person of integrity.
Again with the guessing. You have no idea how test prep companies got the questions.
Anonymous wrote:
You keep trying to make excuses for people lying and cheating. Now it’s the fault of the test company because they should have expected teenagers to lie? Come on.
Most of these kids probably wouldn’t have lied were it not for adults asking them to describe the copyrighted material. They wouldn’t have had any reason to if adults in their lives hadn’t fed them some of this twisted reasoning for why it’s fine to lie about promising not to disclose copyrighted information.
The test isn’t used anymore because it was compromised. And the fault for the compromising lies with the adults who convinced young teens that they didn’t need to honor the promise they signed when they sat down to take the test. It is not the fault of FCPS, the testing company, or the “culture.”
I feel sorry for kids who have families with plenty of money to spend on education but apparently not enough time to give thought what it means to be a person of integrity.
Again with the guessing. You have no idea how test prep companies got the questions.
Someone on this thread, maybe not you, has indicated multiple times that there they believe that there is no ethical problem with people violating an NDA and revealing copyrighted information. That certainly reads that they believe that that is what happened and they have multiple excuses/rationalizations for why they don’t see it as an ethical failing.
Essentially, they’ve been saying, so what if it happened, it’s just “studying.”
Anonymous wrote:
You keep trying to make excuses for people lying and cheating. Now it’s the fault of the test company because they should have expected teenagers to lie? Come on.
Most of these kids probably wouldn’t have lied were it not for adults asking them to describe the copyrighted material. They wouldn’t have had any reason to if adults in their lives hadn’t fed them some of this twisted reasoning for why it’s fine to lie about promising not to disclose copyrighted information.
The test isn’t used anymore because it was compromised. And the fault for the compromising lies with the adults who convinced young teens that they didn’t need to honor the promise they signed when they sat down to take the test. It is not the fault of FCPS, the testing company, or the “culture.”
I feel sorry for kids who have families with plenty of money to spend on education but apparently not enough time to give thought what it means to be a person of integrity.
Again with the guessing. You have no idea how test prep companies got the questions.
Someone on this thread, maybe not you, has indicated multiple times that there they believe that there is no ethical problem with people violating an NDA and revealing copyrighted information. That certainly reads that they believe that that is what happened and they have multiple excuses/rationalizations for why they don’t see it as an ethical failing.
Essentially, they’ve been saying, so what if it happened, it’s just “studying.”
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."
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.
Cracking the test? You mean studying?
If a test relies on ignorance to be valid it is an invalid test.
If the test was a measure of affluence, there would be a lot more white kids making the cut. They literally had to move towards a lottery to increase the white population.
Yes, they mean studying the ill-gotten test answers.
Noone had access to the answers, just the questions.
Just understanding the types of questions being asked helps people prepare the the exam.
But prep only goes so far without academic ability and knowledge.
The fact of the matter is that affluence correlates with many things including parents education level; Parent's education level correlates to focus on education within the home, etc.
If we want to pretend that these things don't result in very real and measurable improvements in academic activity because it would be racist, then we will never get at the issue.
Any system that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret is a system doomed to failure.
If you want a lottery for equal access to education, make the lottery a lot sooner. Have a lottery for charter schools that start at pre-K.
It was an ethics test. You failed.
And that’s why we no longer have quant-q.
Clearly it was the test that failed, otherwise we would still have quant q.
A test that relies on 3000 teenagers keeping a secret is dumb AF.
You keep trying to make excuses for people lying and cheating. Now it’s the fault of the test company because they should have expected teenagers to lie? Come on.
Most of these kids probably wouldn’t have lied were it not for adults asking them to describe the copyrighted material. They wouldn’t have had any reason to if adults in their lives hadn’t fed them some of this twisted reasoning for why it’s fine to lie about promising not to disclose copyrighted information.
The test isn’t used anymore because it was compromised. And the fault for the compromising lies with the adults who convinced young teens that they didn’t need to honor the promise they signed when they sat down to take the test. It is not the fault of FCPS, the testing company, or the “culture.”
I feel sorry for kids who have families with plenty of money to spend on education but apparently not enough time to give thought what it means to be a person of integrity.
Yes. I blame the testing company for not forseeing that teenagers might not be reliable. It is the dumbest ducking business plan that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret.
Tests were pretty much fine exactly the way they were, quant q had pretty small effects on the admitted population. It is disingenuous to argue that this change in the admissions process was about combatting test prep and not race.
If you don't like the advantage affluence has then give the less affluent kids a preference. There is absolutely no 14th amendment issue with helping poor kids.
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."
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.
Cracking the test? You mean studying?
If a test relies on ignorance to be valid it is an invalid test.
If the test was a measure of affluence, there would be a lot more white kids making the cut. They literally had to move towards a lottery to increase the white population.
Yes, they mean studying the ill-gotten test answers.
Noone had access to the answers, just the questions.
Just understanding the types of questions being asked helps people prepare the the exam.
But prep only goes so far without academic ability and knowledge.
The fact of the matter is that affluence correlates with many things including parents education level; Parent's education level correlates to focus on education within the home, etc.
If we want to pretend that these things don't result in very real and measurable improvements in academic activity because it would be racist, then we will never get at the issue.
Any system that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret is a system doomed to failure.
If you want a lottery for equal access to education, make the lottery a lot sooner. Have a lottery for charter schools that start at pre-K.
It was an ethics test. You failed.
And that’s why we no longer have quant-q.
Clearly it was the test that failed, otherwise we would still have quant q.
A test that relies on 3000 teenagers keeping a secret is dumb AF.
You keep trying to make excuses for people lying and cheating. Now it’s the fault of the test company because they should have expected teenagers to lie? Come on.
Most of these kids probably wouldn’t have lied were it not for adults asking them to describe the copyrighted material. They wouldn’t have had any reason to if adults in their lives hadn’t fed them some of this twisted reasoning for why it’s fine to lie about promising not to disclose copyrighted information.
The test isn’t used anymore because it was compromised. And the fault for the compromising lies with the adults who convinced young teens that they didn’t need to honor the promise they signed when they sat down to take the test. It is not the fault of FCPS, the testing company, or the “culture.”
I feel sorry for kids who have families with plenty of money to spend on education but apparently not enough time to give thought what it means to be a person of integrity.
Yes. I blame the testing company for not forseeing that teenagers might not be reliable. It is the dumbest ducking business plan that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret.
Tests were pretty much fine exactly the way they were, quant q had pretty small effects on the admitted population. It is disingenuous to argue that this change in the admissions process was about combatting test prep and not race.
If you don't like the advantage affluence has then give the less affluent kids a preference. There is absolutely no 14th amendment issue with helping poor kids.
If kids don’t see honesty practiced at home, they don’t learn how to be an honest person.
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."
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.
Cracking the test? You mean studying?
If a test relies on ignorance to be valid it is an invalid test.
If the test was a measure of affluence, there would be a lot more white kids making the cut. They literally had to move towards a lottery to increase the white population.
Yes, they mean studying the ill-gotten test answers.
Noone had access to the answers, just the questions.
Just understanding the types of questions being asked helps people prepare the the exam.
But prep only goes so far without academic ability and knowledge.
The fact of the matter is that affluence correlates with many things including parents education level; Parent's education level correlates to focus on education within the home, etc.
If we want to pretend that these things don't result in very real and measurable improvements in academic activity because it would be racist, then we will never get at the issue.
Any system that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret is a system doomed to failure.
If you want a lottery for equal access to education, make the lottery a lot sooner. Have a lottery for charter schools that start at pre-K.
The bolded is very true. The fact of the matter also is that babies do not choose the families they are born into. All children have inherent value: babies born into well off, educated families are not any more valuable than babies born into less well off, less educated families.
Children should not have an advantage in access to a *public* school because the family they happened to be born into focused on education within the home. Children with less well educated parents need to be given the same opportunities. Bright kids exist in all kinds of families: the ones who didn’t luck out with well off and educated parents should have just as much of the opportunity to go to TJ, a public school, as kids who gave them all the educational advantages.
Are you saying that a good home environment and education focused parents are an unfair advantage? That's not what you mean, right?
The poorest people in the country tend to be immigrants and immigrants tend to be among the most education focused and hard working. Should we rob them of the ability to provide these unfair advantage to their kids?
If a rich white kid had crappy academics because his parents didn't really focus on education as much as asian parents do with their kids, we don't give him the same opportunities as the asian kid whose because the asian kid had a more academically supportive home life, do we?
One of the most successful groups in the usa right now are the nigerian and ethiopian immigrants. Should we hold them back because their parents made sacrifices (sacrifices that would make you cry) to provide an educational advantage for their children.
If you want to impose government intervention somewhere, should we really be focused on reducing competition, or should we be focused on making the non-competitive kids more competitive.
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."
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.
Cracking the test? You mean studying?
If a test relies on ignorance to be valid it is an invalid test.
If the test was a measure of affluence, there would be a lot more white kids making the cut. They literally had to move towards a lottery to increase the white population.
Yes, they mean studying the ill-gotten test answers.
Noone had access to the answers, just the questions.
Just understanding the types of questions being asked helps people prepare the the exam.
But prep only goes so far without academic ability and knowledge.
The fact of the matter is that affluence correlates with many things including parents education level; Parent's education level correlates to focus on education within the home, etc.
If we want to pretend that these things don't result in very real and measurable improvements in academic activity because it would be racist, then we will never get at the issue.
Any system that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret is a system doomed to failure.
If you want a lottery for equal access to education, make the lottery a lot sooner. Have a lottery for charter schools that start at pre-K.
It was an ethics test. You failed.
And that’s why we no longer have quant-q.
Clearly it was the test that failed, otherwise we would still have quant q.
A test that relies on 3000 teenagers keeping a secret is dumb AF.
You keep trying to make excuses for people lying and cheating. Now it’s the fault of the test company because they should have expected teenagers to lie? Come on.
Most of these kids probably wouldn’t have lied were it not for adults asking them to describe the copyrighted material. They wouldn’t have had any reason to if adults in their lives hadn’t fed them some of this twisted reasoning for why it’s fine to lie about promising not to disclose copyrighted information.
The test isn’t used anymore because it was compromised. And the fault for the compromising lies with the adults who convinced young teens that they didn’t need to honor the promise they signed when they sat down to take the test. It is not the fault of FCPS, the testing company, or the “culture.”
I feel sorry for kids who have families with plenty of money to spend on education but apparently not enough time to give thought what it means to be a person of integrity.
Yes. I blame the testing company for not forseeing that teenagers might not be reliable. It is the dumbest ducking business plan that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret.
Tests were pretty much fine exactly the way they were, quant q had pretty small effects on the admitted population. It is disingenuous to argue that this change in the admissions process was about combatting test prep and not race.
If you don't like the advantage affluence has then give the less affluent kids a preference. There is absolutely no 14th amendment issue with helping poor kids.
If kids don’t see honesty practiced at home, they don’t learn how to be an honest person.
What are you trying to say? Are Indians dishonest?
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."
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.
Cracking the test? You mean studying?
If a test relies on ignorance to be valid it is an invalid test.
If the test was a measure of affluence, there would be a lot more white kids making the cut. They literally had to move towards a lottery to increase the white population.
Yes, they mean studying the ill-gotten test answers.
Noone had access to the answers, just the questions.
Just understanding the types of questions being asked helps people prepare the the exam.
But prep only goes so far without academic ability and knowledge.
The fact of the matter is that affluence correlates with many things including parents education level; Parent's education level correlates to focus on education within the home, etc.
If we want to pretend that these things don't result in very real and measurable improvements in academic activity because it would be racist, then we will never get at the issue.
Any system that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret is a system doomed to failure.
If you want a lottery for equal access to education, make the lottery a lot sooner. Have a lottery for charter schools that start at pre-K.
The bolded is very true. The fact of the matter also is that babies do not choose the families they are born into. All children have inherent value: babies born into well off, educated families are not any more valuable than babies born into less well off, less educated families.
Children should not have an advantage in access to a *public* school because the family they happened to be born into focused on education within the home. Children with less well educated parents need to be given the same opportunities. Bright kids exist in all kinds of families: the ones who didn’t luck out with well off and educated parents should have just as much of the opportunity to go to TJ, a public school, as kids who gave them all the educational advantages.
Are you saying that a good home environment and education focused parents are an unfair advantage? That's not what you mean, right?
The poorest people in the country tend to be immigrants and immigrants tend to be among the most education focused and hard working. Should we rob them of the ability to provide these unfair advantage to their kids?
If a rich white kid had crappy academics because his parents didn't really focus on education as much as asian parents do with their kids, we don't give him the same opportunities as the asian kid whose because the asian kid had a more academically supportive home life, do we?
One of the most successful groups in the usa right now are the nigerian and ethiopian immigrants. Should we hold them back because their parents made sacrifices (sacrifices that would make you cry) to provide an educational advantage for their children.
If you want to impose government intervention somewhere, should we really be focused on reducing competition, or should we be focused on making the non-competitive kids more competitive.
No, no one wants to hold children back because they happened to be born to parents who value education. By the same token, children born to parents without the background to focus on education shouldn’t be held back either. Children should all have the same opportunities, regardless of the parents they happened to be born to.
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."
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.
Cracking the test? You mean studying?
If a test relies on ignorance to be valid it is an invalid test.
If the test was a measure of affluence, there would be a lot more white kids making the cut. They literally had to move towards a lottery to increase the white population.
Yes, they mean studying the ill-gotten test answers.
Noone had access to the answers, just the questions.
Just understanding the types of questions being asked helps people prepare the the exam.
But prep only goes so far without academic ability and knowledge.
The fact of the matter is that affluence correlates with many things including parents education level; Parent's education level correlates to focus on education within the home, etc.
If we want to pretend that these things don't result in very real and measurable improvements in academic activity because it would be racist, then we will never get at the issue.
Any system that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret is a system doomed to failure.
If you want a lottery for equal access to education, make the lottery a lot sooner. Have a lottery for charter schools that start at pre-K.
It was an ethics test. You failed.
And that’s why we no longer have quant-q.
Clearly it was the test that failed, otherwise we would still have quant q.
A test that relies on 3000 teenagers keeping a secret is dumb AF.
You keep trying to make excuses for people lying and cheating. Now it’s the fault of the test company because they should have expected teenagers to lie? Come on.
Most of these kids probably wouldn’t have lied were it not for adults asking them to describe the copyrighted material. They wouldn’t have had any reason to if adults in their lives hadn’t fed them some of this twisted reasoning for why it’s fine to lie about promising not to disclose copyrighted information.
The test isn’t used anymore because it was compromised. And the fault for the compromising lies with the adults who convinced young teens that they didn’t need to honor the promise they signed when they sat down to take the test. It is not the fault of FCPS, the testing company, or the “culture.”
I feel sorry for kids who have families with plenty of money to spend on education but apparently not enough time to give thought what it means to be a person of integrity.
Yes. I blame the testing company for not forseeing that teenagers might not be reliable. It is the dumbest ducking business plan that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret.
Tests were pretty much fine exactly the way they were, quant q had pretty small effects on the admitted population. It is disingenuous to argue that this change in the admissions process was about combatting test prep and not race.
If you don't like the advantage affluence has then give the less affluent kids a preference. There is absolutely no 14th amendment issue with helping poor kids.
If kids don’t see honesty practiced at home, they don’t learn how to be an honest person.
What are you trying to say? Are Indians dishonest?
Of course not. We are only referring here specifically to people who have posted giving excuses why it is okay for people who have signed a NDA to go ahead and disclose the copyrighted material they promised not to disclose. Only those particular posters are being referred to here as being less than honest.
Asian Indian Americans are making sure we get from point A to point me when I drop my DD at her playdate with Google maps provided by Google CEO, who is Indian. I run my family as a technical support analyst due to Microsoft software, provided by Microsoft CEO, who is Indian, etc. Most of our America runs on technologies that are either managed or created by American Indians.
Anonymous wrote:Asian Indian Americans are making sure we get from point A to point me when I drop my DD at her playdate with Google maps provided by Google CEO, who is Indian. I run my family as a technical support analyst due to Microsoft software, provided by Microsoft CEO, who is Indian, etc. Most of our America runs on technologies that are either managed or created by American Indians.
Okay? Not seeing any relationship to anything on this thread here…
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."
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.
Cracking the test? You mean studying?
If a test relies on ignorance to be valid it is an invalid test.
If the test was a measure of affluence, there would be a lot more white kids making the cut. They literally had to move towards a lottery to increase the white population.
Yes, they mean studying the ill-gotten test answers.
Noone had access to the answers, just the questions.
Just understanding the types of questions being asked helps people prepare the the exam.
But prep only goes so far without academic ability and knowledge.
The fact of the matter is that affluence correlates with many things including parents education level; Parent's education level correlates to focus on education within the home, etc.
If we want to pretend that these things don't result in very real and measurable improvements in academic activity because it would be racist, then we will never get at the issue.
Any system that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret is a system doomed to failure.
If you want a lottery for equal access to education, make the lottery a lot sooner. Have a lottery for charter schools that start at pre-K.
The bolded is very true. The fact of the matter also is that babies do not choose the families they are born into. All children have inherent value: babies born into well off, educated families are not any more valuable than babies born into less well off, less educated families.
Children should not have an advantage in access to a *public* school because the family they happened to be born into focused on education within the home. Children with less well educated parents need to be given the same opportunities. Bright kids exist in all kinds of families: the ones who didn’t luck out with well off and educated parents should have just as much of the opportunity to go to TJ, a public school, as kids who gave them all the educational advantages.
Are you saying that a good home environment and education focused parents are an unfair advantage? That's not what you mean, right?
The poorest people in the country tend to be immigrants and immigrants tend to be among the most education focused and hard working. Should we rob them of the ability to provide these unfair advantage to their kids?
If a rich white kid had crappy academics because his parents didn't really focus on education as much as asian parents do with their kids, we don't give him the same opportunities as the asian kid whose because the asian kid had a more academically supportive home life, do we?
One of the most successful groups in the usa right now are the nigerian and ethiopian immigrants. Should we hold them back because their parents made sacrifices (sacrifices that would make you cry) to provide an educational advantage for their children.
If you want to impose government intervention somewhere, should we really be focused on reducing competition, or should we be focused on making the non-competitive kids more competitive.
No, no one wants to hold children back because they happened to be born to parents who value education. By the same token, children born to parents without the background to focus on education shouldn’t be held back either. Children should all have the same opportunities, regardless of the parents they happened to be born to.
But that is exactly what is being pushed. Aren't you saying that asians have the asian parent advantage so we have to take opportunity away from them and give it to other kids who don't have the asian parent advantage? How is that not holding them back?
And in what way are we holding back kids who don't actually have the academic chops for whatever reason? Should we also give kids who were unfairly born with less academic talent, I mean the kids at tj did nothing to deserve their intellect, drive and focus. At least some of that is genetic and you deserve your genes about as much as you deserve your parents. Should we correct for that too?
This is harrison bergeron world we are approaching isn't it?
I understand the desire for fairness but this mythical fairness will never exist in this world unless we take all the kids away at birth and raise them in a creche and even then the less intelligent kids will be at an "unfair" disadvantage. I guess it's about where you draw the line. I don't think parents should be able to leave billions of dollars to kids but as a society we allow that. I don't think donors and legacy applicants should get a preference, but we allow that. It seems weird that we would say that we should not allow kids the benefit of their own efforts because they grew up in an education focused environment.
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."
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.
Cracking the test? You mean studying?
If a test relies on ignorance to be valid it is an invalid test.
If the test was a measure of affluence, there would be a lot more white kids making the cut. They literally had to move towards a lottery to increase the white population.
Yes, they mean studying the ill-gotten test answers.
Noone had access to the answers, just the questions.
Just understanding the types of questions being asked helps people prepare the the exam.
But prep only goes so far without academic ability and knowledge.
The fact of the matter is that affluence correlates with many things including parents education level; Parent's education level correlates to focus on education within the home, etc.
If we want to pretend that these things don't result in very real and measurable improvements in academic activity because it would be racist, then we will never get at the issue.
Any system that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret is a system doomed to failure.
If you want a lottery for equal access to education, make the lottery a lot sooner. Have a lottery for charter schools that start at pre-K.
It was an ethics test. You failed.
And that’s why we no longer have quant-q.
Clearly it was the test that failed, otherwise we would still have quant q.
A test that relies on 3000 teenagers keeping a secret is dumb AF.
You keep trying to make excuses for people lying and cheating. Now it’s the fault of the test company because they should have expected teenagers to lie? Come on.
Most of these kids probably wouldn’t have lied were it not for adults asking them to describe the copyrighted material. They wouldn’t have had any reason to if adults in their lives hadn’t fed them some of this twisted reasoning for why it’s fine to lie about promising not to disclose copyrighted information.
The test isn’t used anymore because it was compromised. And the fault for the compromising lies with the adults who convinced young teens that they didn’t need to honor the promise they signed when they sat down to take the test. It is not the fault of FCPS, the testing company, or the “culture.”
I feel sorry for kids who have families with plenty of money to spend on education but apparently not enough time to give thought what it means to be a person of integrity.
Yes. I blame the testing company for not forseeing that teenagers might not be reliable. It is the dumbest ducking business plan that requires 3000 teenagers to keep a secret.
Tests were pretty much fine exactly the way they were, quant q had pretty small effects on the admitted population. It is disingenuous to argue that this change in the admissions process was about combatting test prep and not race.
If you don't like the advantage affluence has then give the less affluent kids a preference. There is absolutely no 14th amendment issue with helping poor kids.
If kids don’t see honesty practiced at home, they don’t learn how to be an honest person.
What are you trying to say? Are Indians dishonest?
Of course not. We are only referring here specifically to people who have posted giving excuses why it is okay for people who have signed a NDA to go ahead and disclose the copyrighted material they promised not to disclose. Only those particular posters are being referred to here as being less than honest.
Really? So you're not talking about the actual sharing of the questions at an almost exclusively indian prep center, you are talking about the people who laugh at your naivete in thinking that 3000 teenagers would be able to keep a secret? You sound like one of those people who think that abstinence is an effective form of birth control for teenagers.
Anonymous wrote:Asian Indian Americans are making sure we get from point A to point me when I drop my DD at her playdate with Google maps provided by Google CEO, who is Indian. I run my family as a technical support analyst due to Microsoft software, provided by Microsoft CEO, who is Indian, etc. Most of our America runs on technologies that are either managed or created by American Indians.
Okay? Not seeing any relationship to anything on this thread here…
Welp, a lot of people here seem to be implying that indian americans are dishonest and the only reason they were so over-represented is because they cheat and buy test answers.
The poster you are responding to is saying that if that were true, then how would we explain all the contributions of indian american to the technological revolution we are going through.
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