4th Grade CES Admission Criteria?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No conspiracy. I do think there were parents who thought they had the system figured out. Their children were sufficiently prepped and then they successfully scored high enough on the different metrics that would have been competitive in years past. But not this year.

The students who were not invited just did not score high enough because of the change.

I think the parents of those students feel cheated, but the current system is more fair in my opinion. Others have stated why over and over, so I won’t rehash. But the parents who think it’s unfair won’t ever hear it. They’ll continue to think their child was more deserving and was cheated out of a superior education because they’re [insert reason].

You are NOT listening too. Past posts said highest scorers were not invited due to cohort. You just chose to think in your way.

+1
In the past them main way MCPS ranked candidates was globally. Every applicant was looked at against every applicant.
Because of the peer cohort criteria kids are essentially competing with other kids at their own school.

So if Larla goes to Cold Spring and has straight As, 99th percentile Cogat, 99th percentile MAP but they have 5 other kids with all As, 99.9th percentile Cogat, 99th percentile MAP and 7 others just like her at "only" 99th percentile Cogat she will likely not get in. Either to the CES or MS Magnet.

If Larlo goes to a low performing school has As and Bs, 95th percentile Cogat, 90th percentile MAP and is the top scorer in his grade and everyone else in the 80s for MAP he would get in under the new admissions process.

Is this more fair? I can see both sides but PPs who keep insisting that many parents are upset because their kids just didn't score "high enough" need to better understand what happened before they open their mouths. It's simply not true.

If you look at the documents MCPS has posted on its CES/Magnet website, that's what changed formally. At the MS magnet level, the only datapoint I have, which is DC's CES school, points to a real, significant drop in the then-5th graders selected for the two magnets in Spring 2018 compared to 2017. So much so that the principal made a point to mentioning it at the orientation/open house. But at the regional CES level, I haven't seen a single post from a parent saying, wow, in 2017 it was 3 kids and now it's 10 kids that were selected from the home ES. (Barnsley, with the same number of seats but less ES covered, ought to be an example.) Obviously, a number of posters report it went the other way for their home ES. At our DC's home ES, it was basically the same, as best I can tell, but maybe it would have been different had the criteria not changed. The problem is that going from 7 to 4 or 5 to 8 may be just due to specific students more than anything else. Maybe MoCo will eventually release that information, but it's doubtful. It may be another year or two before the effects are clearer.

[Anonymous]

If this was what was done, which I think it was, then it wasn’t just separating the really high standard scores and inviting those students. MCPS looked holistically at students and their peer cohorts. If a kid was 150 in a school with a small group of 120s—then, yeah, he’s probably getting invited. If another kid is 150 with a large peer cohort in the 130s-140s—maybe not. If a third kid is a 150 with that same cohort of plenty of 140s and 150s but something stands out showing she is an outlier—maybe she gets selected.

The truth is there were kids from those schools with large peer cohorts who were invited. It just have been because they were outliers.

This tracks with my experience with a middle schooler and a current CES kid - for both the CES and middle school magnet programs, the outliers were selected and it is easier to be an outlier at a more heterogeneous school.

The one thing I expect to see change in the coming year is more kids going from the CES into the middle school magnets. I really do think they messed that up last year, perhaps even inadvertently. They were clearly comparing CES kids to one another, rather than to their home school peer group, or even the incoming middle school peer group. That ended up hurting CES kids all over the county, not just at the highest performing clusters.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

If this was what was done, which I think it was, then it wasn’t just separating the really high standard scores and inviting those students. MCPS looked holistically at students and their peer cohorts. If a kid was 150 in a school with a small group of 120s—then, yeah, he’s probably getting invited. If another kid is 150 with a large peer cohort in the 130s-140s—maybe not. If a third kid is a 150 with that same cohort of plenty of 140s and 150s but something stands out showing she is an outlier—maybe she gets selected.

The truth is there were kids from those schools with large peer cohorts who were invited. It just have been because they were outliers.

This tracks with my experience with a middle schooler and a current CES kid - for both the CES and middle school magnet programs, the outliers were selected and it is easier to be an outlier at a more heterogeneous school.

The one thing I expect to see change in the coming year is more kids going from the CES into the middle school magnets. I really do think they messed that up last year, perhaps even inadvertently. They were clearly comparing CES kids to one another, rather than to their home school peer group, or even the incoming middle school peer group. That ended up hurting CES kids all over the county, not just at the highest performing clusters.

Kid needed to be outlier for MS grouping, not within their CES. That's a much higher hurdle.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

If this was what was done, which I think it was, then it wasn’t just separating the really high standard scores and inviting those students. MCPS looked holistically at students and their peer cohorts. If a kid was 150 in a school with a small group of 120s—then, yeah, he’s probably getting invited. If another kid is 150 with a large peer cohort in the 130s-140s—maybe not. If a third kid is a 150 with that same cohort of plenty of 140s and 150s but something stands out showing she is an outlier—maybe she gets selected.

The truth is there were kids from those schools with large peer cohorts who were invited. It just have been because they were outliers.

This tracks with my experience with a middle schooler and a current CES kid - for both the CES and middle school magnet programs, the outliers were selected and it is easier to be an outlier at a more heterogeneous school.

The one thing I expect to see change in the coming year is more kids going from the CES into the middle school magnets. I really do think they messed that up last year, perhaps even inadvertently. They were clearly comparing CES kids to one another, rather than to their home school peer group, or even the incoming middle school peer group. That ended up hurting CES kids all over the county, not just at the highest performing clusters.

CES is not a stepping stone to every magnet. For example, STEM has little to do with a humanities-focused enrichment program.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

I think there are two scenarios. At some schools there may be clear standout students. The Cogat scores, which parents did not get but the school district definitely has, could be 99th percentile at 135 or 99th percentile at 155. In this case if both students had perfect grades and perfect scores in other admissions criteria you would take the 155 child. Given how rare that 155 kid is in the general population it's unlikely there were standouts at EVERY school. In some schools there may well have been a cluster of 20 nearly equal kids at the top. FARMS could have made the difference in this case but unclear what they did at schools where there are few FARMS students. Anecdotally, it seems pretty random.

In looking at DD's class there are a half dozen clear outliers based on information the kids share with each other about test performance. The rest are kind of clustered in the same 97th-99th percentile area similar to many kids at the home school taking the enriched classes in MS.

I think what you said makes sense. But I don’t believe this was the actual implementation. If this is the real case, why don’t MCPS report SAS instead of 99%? I remember MCPS rep said specifically all 99% were the same. Some other dcurbanmom posts cited the measurement error of SAS as reasons not to use them. It looks like people are not exactly evaluating the same policy as we have injected our own assumptions to fill out the information gap.

You're partially correct. MCPS used the percentiles for the initial identification of "highly able" students. Then they looked at other parts of a student's records. We were told they did have access to the raw scores. MCPS did not report the SAS or median scores to parents because of this very problem we are having now with people trying to figure out how the system was unfair.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

If this was what was done, which I think it was, then it wasn’t just separating the really high standard scores and inviting those students. MCPS looked holistically at students and their peer cohorts. If a kid was 150 in a school with a small group of 120s—then, yeah, he’s probably getting invited. If another kid is 150 with a large peer cohort in the 130s-140s—maybe not. If a third kid is a 150 with that same cohort of plenty of 140s and 150s but something stands out showing she is an outlier—maybe she gets selected.

The truth is there were kids from those schools with large peer cohorts who were invited. It just have been because they were outliers.

Not necessarily. One of their goals was representation from every school or as many schools as possible so for the magnets they took at least one child from all feeders, for CES at least 2 but more likely 3-4 or more.
They had several rounds of screening. They went back and made sure they had representation from all these schools and if there was on clear outlier they picked from the group of top performers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:[Some other dcurbanmom posts cited the measurement error of SAS as reasons not to use them.

A 130 and 125 maybe basically the same but the standard error is not so bad that they cannot tell the difference between a 130 and a 150 kid or a 130 kid and a 110 kid. So, yes, you can look at SAS for all the 99th percentile kids and find a few real outliers. But statistically speaking there should be very few.

The estimate is something like 13 out of 10,000 people have IQs over 145. Each MCPS grade is something like 10,000-12,000 so even if you account for the DC area having a higher concentration of gifted children than elsewhere that means each CES may have only a few really profoundly gifted students and the TPMS and Blair magnets may have a few dozen. The rest are just really really smart kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

If this was what was done, which I think it was, then it wasn’t just separating the really high standard scores and inviting those students. MCPS looked holistically at students and their peer cohorts. If a kid was 150 in a school with a small group of 120s—then, yeah, he’s probably getting invited. If another kid is 150 with a large peer cohort in the 130s-140s—maybe not. If a third kid is a 150 with that same cohort of plenty of 140s and 150s but something stands out showing she is an outlier—maybe she gets selected.

The truth is there were kids from those schools with large peer cohorts who were invited. It just have been because they were outliers.

Not necessarily. One of their goals was representation from every school or as many schools as possible so for the magnets they took at least one child from all feeders, for CES at least 2 but more likely 3-4 or more.
They had several rounds of screening. They went back and made sure they had representation from all these schools and if there was on clear outlier they picked from the group of top performers.

^^If there was NO clear outlier they picked from the top performers.