TJ Admissions Roundup

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m still waiting for an answer as to the culture is being referred to in the above post and what cultural perspective doesn’t see dishonesty as a measure of integrity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m not sure what you mean by the word “culture,” but a company has a legal right to restrict access to its copyrighted materials. One way to deal with access is to say, “We will allow you to make use of the materials we have created as long as you agree not to discuss those materials with any outsiders.” Then, anyone can choose to make that promise if they want to use the materials. If they don’t want to make that promise, they don’t have to use the materials.

While it might be true that teenagers are not good at keeping promises, adults around them should be helping them to keep promises, not the opposite. It does not matter in the least if a kid thinks they shouldn’t have had to make that promise to take a test- because the company has the legal right to require that promise.

Again, I’m not sure what you mean by “culture,” but I would love to see a link to a source that shows dishonesty is more a reflection of one’s cultural perspective rather than of one’s integrity. Especially when all the parties involved are living in a location where it is not the norm to be okay with freely agreeing that you will do something and then doing the opposite. But, please, give us all a link to source that tells us about a culture where it is fine to violate a promise so we can all have our “cultural perspective” improved.

Copyright? Math questions are not copyrightable. An entire test, may be but not individual questions.
This is not a copyright issue. At best it is a contract issue and these kids are 13.
So there is no legal restriction here. You are basically relying on the notion that these kids did something they agreed not to do.

But that's all besides the point because the changed the admissions process had little to do with test prepping and everything to do with race.

Yes, relying on the idea that the kids did something they agreed not to do, which is engaging in a dishonest act. If there were adults involved who encouraged the teens to share copyrighted material, I would have a very low opinion of such an adult.

And yes, a test is copyrightable. You can’t just separate out individual questions from the whole and say, oh, a math question is not copyrightable, so, voila, no copyright issue here.

I would still like to know what the PP meant by saying that we just don’t have the right “cultural perspective” to understand why this type of dishonesty is okay.

I don't know wtf they are talking about with the cultural honesty issue but there is no copyright issue here.

You can have a preview of a movie and have everyone sign an NDA but if they violate that NDA, it is not a copyright issue, it is a contract issue.
If you go to a movie and talk about it with your friends afterwards, you have not violated anyone's copyright.

If a test relies on the element of surprise to be useful and becomes useless when the format of the test is revealed, then it is a pretty useless test.

How else would one assess a student's ability to develop their own method for solving a problem of a type they'd never seen before? That's a pretty important skill to evaluate given that a huge part of the point of STEM is, you know, innovation and the solving of problems that haven't been solved yet.

QED.

How exactly does the current method select for a student's ability to develop their own method for solving a problem of a type they'd never seen before?

You seem to have trouble keeping up. FCPS had to drop that type of test because of the cheaters.

Not me. Someone said that we needed surprise test formats so that we could measure a student's ability to develop their own method for solving a problem type they'd never seen before. So if that is what we are selecting for then how does a bunch of essays select for that? The text and email traffic between FCPS board members clearly show that they were not particularly concerned about test prep, they were primarily concerned about skin color.

Well they also have these things called classes that measures exactly this kind of thing and they use metrics from it to evaluate ability. There would be no point in making a special test since students are tested week after week all year long currently.

Wait. You think classroom tests measure a student's ability to develop their own method for solving a problem type they'd never seen before?
Do you have any evidence to support this belief?

Of course they do. That's the whole point. If you feel otherwise, you should unenroll you children from FCPS.

The tests at FCPS rewards studying.
They don't use novel testing formats to try and figure out how well that can adapt to unfamiliar testing formats.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Nope, people are not talking about Indian Americans as a group.

They are talking about specific posters who appear to be making excuses for adults who may have convinced tweens/young teens to violate the terms of a NDA that the young people signed. They may have convinced young people to reveal copyrighted information that they had only been allowed to access because they agreed to not reveal the information to any outsider. The people making excuses and rationalizations appear to be admitting that these things happened and they are explaining why there’s nothing wrong with it in their minds.

Sure, children sometimes lie and/cheat, but generally adults aren’t telling them that it’s perfectly fine to do so. Any adult who does that is very lacking in character and integrity.

None is here is saying it's perfectly fine for kid to do something they promised not to do. People are saying that relying on 3000 kids to keep a secret for your admissions process to work is like relying on abstinence for teen birth control.

Some TJ students families are from cultures where cheating is widely accepted. We need to be more tolerant of other cultures.

And which cultures are those?

It's BS. Cheating isn't "widely acceptable" anywhere.

Yes it is acceptable. Especially among those who enjoy unearned Asian privilege.

What do you mean by "unearned Asian privilege"? If you think Asian students can cheat their way to TJ, look at their performance at IMO, IPhO, USACO, ISEF, 3M etc. You think they can cheat their way there too, Monron.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Nope, people are not talking about Indian Americans as a group.

They are talking about specific posters who appear to be making excuses for adults who may have convinced tweens/young teens to violate the terms of a NDA that the young people signed. They may have convinced young people to reveal copyrighted information that they had only been allowed to access because they agreed to not reveal the information to any outsider. The people making excuses and rationalizations appear to be admitting that these things happened and they are explaining why there’s nothing wrong with it in their minds.

Sure, children sometimes lie and/cheat, but generally adults aren’t telling them that it’s perfectly fine to do so. Any adult who does that is very lacking in character and integrity.

None is here is saying it's perfectly fine for kid to do something they promised not to do. People are saying that relying on 3000 kids to keep a secret for your admissions process to work is like relying on abstinence for teen birth control.

Some TJ students families are from cultures where cheating is widely accepted. We need to be more tolerant of other cultures.

And which cultures are those?

It's BS. Cheating isn't "widely acceptable" anywhere.

Yes it is acceptable. Especially among those who enjoy unearned Asian privilege.

What do you mean by "unearned Asian privilege"? If you think Asian students can cheat their way to TJ, look at their performance at IMO, IPhO, USACO, ISEF, 3M etc. You think they can cheat their way there too, Monron.

I think it was brought up earlier that asians don't deserve their success because they had better parents and grew up in a better culture and they did nothing to deserve that. Oh, and they cheated too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m still waiting for an answer as to the culture is being referred to in the above post and what cultural perspective doesn’t see dishonesty as a measure of integrity.

Still waiting for an answer from the poster a few posts above who says that dishonesty is more a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than a measure of integrity. What culture is that poster talking about?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m still waiting for an answer as to the culture is being referred to in the above post and what cultural perspective doesn’t see dishonesty as a measure of integrity.

Still waiting for an answer from the poster a few posts above who says that dishonesty is more a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than a measure of integrity. What culture is that poster talking about?

It is pretty clear that the poster was talking about indians. He specifically singled out a kumon type school that is almost entirely indian. I am pretty sure they would have said the same about any over-achieving group because no single group can be better than any other group at anything, any differences are entirely the result of differences in oppression.

East asians encountered this "they must be cheating" narrative until the indians started outperforming east asains. It was so common that it became a racist trope.
It took a while to identify it as racism because the racism was coming form the left. The racists sometimes didn't realize they were being racist, they thought they were being "allies" to other minority groups.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m still waiting for an answer as to the culture is being referred to in the above post and what cultural perspective doesn’t see dishonesty as a measure of integrity.

Still waiting for an answer from the poster a few posts above who says that dishonesty is more a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than a measure of integrity. What culture is that poster talking about?

It is pretty clear that the poster was talking about indians. He specifically singled out a kumon type school that is almost entirely indian. I am pretty sure they would have said the same about any over-achieving group because no single group can be better than any other group at anything, any differences are entirely the result of differences in oppression.

East asians encountered this "they must be cheating" narrative until the indians started outperforming east asains. It was so common that it became a racist trope.
It took a while to identify it as racism because the racism was coming form the left. The racists sometimes didn't realize they were being racist, they thought they were being "allies" to other minority groups.

There is no special explanation for the performance of Asian students. It's all because of how immigration works in this country. A large number of Asian students are from families of immigrants. Most Asian immigrants coming to the states are pretty recent and as either college students or skilled workers. They simply don't have other immigration options as other groups. Therefore, who can come and survive here are likely well educated, motivated, and hard working. Those traits and qualities influence their kids and their performance.

This is simply selection bias and survivorship bias. If you compare the performance of an average Asian student in his/her original country with that of students from other groups in their countries, the difference will be much less significant.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m still waiting for an answer as to the culture is being referred to in the above post and what cultural perspective doesn’t see dishonesty as a measure of integrity.

Still waiting for an answer from the poster a few posts above who says that dishonesty is more a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than a measure of integrity. What culture is that poster talking about?

It is pretty clear that the poster was talking about indians. He specifically singled out a kumon type school that is almost entirely indian. I am pretty sure they would have said the same about any over-achieving group because no single group can be better than any other group at anything, any differences are entirely the result of differences in oppression.

East asians encountered this "they must be cheating" narrative until the indians started outperforming east asains. It was so common that it became a racist trope.
It took a while to identify it as racism because the racism was coming form the left. The racists sometimes didn't realize they were being racist, they thought they were being "allies" to other minority groups.

There is no special explanation for the performance of Asian students. It's all because of how immigration works in this country. A large number of Asian students are from families of immigrants. Most Asian immigrants coming to the states are pretty recent and as either college students or skilled workers. They simply don't have other immigration options as other groups. Therefore, who can come and survive here are likely well educated, motivated, and hard working. Those traits and qualities influence their kids and their performance.

This is simply selection bias and survivorship bias. If you compare the performance of an average Asian student in his/her original country with that of students from other groups in their countries, the difference will be much less significant.

I get that you are supporting my position that asian success is not th3e result of cheating, but...
While selection bias certainly has something to do with indian and filipino success, it doesn't explain everything.
Like, how would you explain the academic success of second generation vietnamese?

My wild ass guess is that culture has something to do with it. Thousands of years of education being the primary form of social mobility gives people from confucian cultures a level of faith in educations that allows them to make painful sacrifices that others will not make.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m still waiting for an answer as to the culture is being referred to in the above post and what cultural perspective doesn’t see dishonesty as a measure of integrity.

Still waiting for an answer from the poster a few posts above who says that dishonesty is more a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than a measure of integrity. What culture is that poster talking about?

It is pretty clear that the poster was talking about indians. He specifically singled out a kumon type school that is almost entirely indian. I am pretty sure they would have said the same about any over-achieving group because no single group can be better than any other group at anything, any differences are entirely the result of differences in oppression.

East asians encountered this "they must be cheating" narrative until the indians started outperforming east asains. It was so common that it became a racist trope.
It took a while to identify it as racism because the racism was coming form the left. The racists sometimes didn't realize they were being racist, they thought they were being "allies" to other minority groups.

There is no special explanation for the performance of Asian students. It's all because of how immigration works in this country. A large number of Asian students are from families of immigrants. Most Asian immigrants coming to the states are pretty recent and as either college students or skilled workers. They simply don't have other immigration options as other groups. Therefore, who can come and survive here are likely well educated, motivated, and hard working. Those traits and qualities influence their kids and their performance.

This is simply selection bias and survivorship bias. If you compare the performance of an average Asian student in his/her original country with that of students from other groups in their countries, the difference will be much less significant.

I get that you are supporting my position that asian success is not th3e result of cheating, but...
While selection bias certainly has something to do with indian and filipino success, it doesn't explain everything.
Like, how would you explain the academic success of second generation vietnamese?

My wild ass guess is that culture has something to do with it. Thousands of years of education being the primary form of social mobility gives people from confucian cultures a level of faith in educations that allows them to make painful sacrifices that others will not make.

Yes, only losers would think that people could cheat into TJ, winning STEM competitions, or succeeding at top corporations.

I don't reject the effects of cultural factors, but I think the selection and survivorship effects are dominating here. Those effects may fade away over time but it takes a lot more than 2 generations to disappear.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m still waiting for an answer as to the culture is being referred to in the above post and what cultural perspective doesn’t see dishonesty as a measure of integrity.

Still waiting for an answer from the poster a few posts above who says that dishonesty is more a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than a measure of integrity. What culture is that poster talking about?

It is pretty clear that the poster was talking about indians. He specifically singled out a kumon type school that is almost entirely indian. I am pretty sure they would have said the same about any over-achieving group because no single group can be better than any other group at anything, any differences are entirely the result of differences in oppression.

East asians encountered this "they must be cheating" narrative until the indians started outperforming east asains. It was so common that it became a racist trope.
It took a while to identify it as racism because the racism was coming form the left. The racists sometimes didn't realize they were being racist, they thought they were being "allies" to other minority groups.

The poster I’m looking for an answer from is not the one who has been posting about a test prep school. It’s the poster above who was making excuses for kids who sign a statement saying they won’t discuss test questions with outsiders but go ahead and disclose them. The poster was trying to indicate that it’s not dishonest to do that, it’s a reflection of a “cultural perspective.”
The poster refuses to identify the culture they are referring to.

Here’s the quote from above:

“…How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.”

This poster is saying it’s okay for kids to discuss test questions even if they signed an NDA because they might have a different cultural perspective. I’m asking what culture teaches children that it’s okay to promise that you’ll do something and then do the opposite and apparently, according to the poster, doesn’t view dishonesty as related to a person’s integrity or lack thereof.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m still waiting for an answer as to the culture is being referred to in the above post and what cultural perspective doesn’t see dishonesty as a measure of integrity.

Still waiting for an answer from the poster a few posts above who says that dishonesty is more a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than a measure of integrity. What culture is that poster talking about?

It is pretty clear that the poster was talking about indians. He specifically singled out a kumon type school that is almost entirely indian. I am pretty sure they would have said the same about any over-achieving group because no single group can be better than any other group at anything, any differences are entirely the result of differences in oppression.

East asians encountered this "they must be cheating" narrative until the indians started outperforming east asains. It was so common that it became a racist trope.
It took a while to identify it as racism because the racism was coming form the left. The racists sometimes didn't realize they were being racist, they thought they were being "allies" to other minority groups.

There is no special explanation for the performance of Asian students. It's all because of how immigration works in this country. A large number of Asian students are from families of immigrants. Most Asian immigrants coming to the states are pretty recent and as either college students or skilled workers. They simply don't have other immigration options as other groups. Therefore, who can come and survive here are likely well educated, motivated, and hard working. Those traits and qualities influence their kids and their performance.

This is simply selection bias and survivorship bias. If you compare the performance of an average Asian student in his/her original country with that of students from other groups in their countries, the difference will be much less significant.

I get that you are supporting my position that asian success is not th3e result of cheating, but...
While selection bias certainly has something to do with indian and filipino success, it doesn't explain everything.
Like, how would you explain the academic success of second generation vietnamese?

My wild ass guess is that culture has something to do with it. Thousands of years of education being the primary form of social mobility gives people from confucian cultures a level of faith in educations that allows them to make painful sacrifices that others will not make.

Yes, only losers would think that people could cheat into TJ, winning STEM competitions, or succeeding at top corporations.

I don't reject the effects of cultural factors, but I think the selection and survivorship effects are dominating here. Those effects may fade away over time but it takes a lot more than 2 generations to disappear.

Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that I am not sure exists here.
I think some groups have far more selection bias than others.
Currently, there is a ton of selection bias in determining which south asians immigrate.
I don't think there is much, if any, selection bias in which vietnamese are here vs still in vietnam.
The other asian groups are somewhere in between.
However the primary source of the differences between whites and asian americans is effort not cognitive ability or SES.

Here is a peer reviewed study that explains that the differences in academic achievement results primarily (not necessarily exclusively) from a difference in effort. That difference is a result of a difference in cultural attitudes about education.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1406402111

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m still waiting for an answer as to the culture is being referred to in the above post and what cultural perspective doesn’t see dishonesty as a measure of integrity.

Still waiting for an answer from the poster a few posts above who says that dishonesty is more a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than a measure of integrity. What culture is that poster talking about?

It is pretty clear that the poster was talking about indians. He specifically singled out a kumon type school that is almost entirely indian. I am pretty sure they would have said the same about any over-achieving group because no single group can be better than any other group at anything, any differences are entirely the result of differences in oppression.

East asians encountered this "they must be cheating" narrative until the indians started outperforming east asains. It was so common that it became a racist trope.
It took a while to identify it as racism because the racism was coming form the left. The racists sometimes didn't realize they were being racist, they thought they were being "allies" to other minority groups.

There is no special explanation for the performance of Asian students. It's all because of how immigration works in this country. A large number of Asian students are from families of immigrants. Most Asian immigrants coming to the states are pretty recent and as either college students or skilled workers. They simply don't have other immigration options as other groups. Therefore, who can come and survive here are likely well educated, motivated, and hard working. Those traits and qualities influence their kids and their performance.

This is simply selection bias and survivorship bias. If you compare the performance of an average Asian student in his/her original country with that of students from other groups in their countries, the difference will be much less significant.

I get that you are supporting my position that asian success is not th3e result of cheating, but...
While selection bias certainly has something to do with indian and filipino success, it doesn't explain everything.
Like, how would you explain the academic success of second generation vietnamese?

My wild ass guess is that culture has something to do with it. Thousands of years of education being the primary form of social mobility gives people from confucian cultures a level of faith in educations that allows them to make painful sacrifices that others will not make.

Yes, only losers would think that people could cheat into TJ, winning STEM competitions, or succeeding at top corporations.

I don't reject the effects of cultural factors, but I think the selection and survivorship effects are dominating here. Those effects may fade away over time but it takes a lot more than 2 generations to disappear.

Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that I am not sure exists here.
I think some groups have far more selection bias than others.
Currently, there is a ton of selection bias in determining which south asians immigrate.
I don't think there is much, if any, selection bias in which vietnamese are here vs still in vietnam.
The other asian groups are somewhere in between.
However the primary source of the differences between whites and asian americans is effort not cognitive ability or SES.

Here is a peer reviewed study that explains that the differences in academic achievement results primarily (not necessarily exclusively) from a difference in effort. That difference is a result of a difference in cultural attitudes about education.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1406402111

If you read about Vietnamese refugees in the US, you will see the hell journey that they went through to be here after the Vietnam War. From 300 thousand to 1 million of them died at sea. They also spent years living in refugee camps before they found a way to the US. That life experience greatly influenced the families of Vietnamese refugees. I don't reject the effects of cultural factors. However, Asian immigrants often have to go through more challenging paths to the US than other groups. Also, only those who possess the necessary traits to adapt and succeed can remain in the US, while many others have to return to their home countries. This is what I mean by survivorship bias.

[Anonymous]

Kids from economically-disadvantaged, Asian families were practically nonexistent at TJ before the admissions change. It helped them more than other groups, per the appellate judicial opinion.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m still waiting for an answer as to the culture is being referred to in the above post and what cultural perspective doesn’t see dishonesty as a measure of integrity.

Still waiting for an answer from the poster a few posts above who says that dishonesty is more a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than a measure of integrity. What culture is that poster talking about?

It is pretty clear that the poster was talking about indians. He specifically singled out a kumon type school that is almost entirely indian. I am pretty sure they would have said the same about any over-achieving group because no single group can be better than any other group at anything, any differences are entirely the result of differences in oppression.

East asians encountered this "they must be cheating" narrative until the indians started outperforming east asains. It was so common that it became a racist trope.
It took a while to identify it as racism because the racism was coming form the left. The racists sometimes didn't realize they were being racist, they thought they were being "allies" to other minority groups.

There is no special explanation for the performance of Asian students. It's all because of how immigration works in this country. A large number of Asian students are from families of immigrants. Most Asian immigrants coming to the states are pretty recent and as either college students or skilled workers. They simply don't have other immigration options as other groups. Therefore, who can come and survive here are likely well educated, motivated, and hard working. Those traits and qualities influence their kids and their performance.

This is simply selection bias and survivorship bias. If you compare the performance of an average Asian student in his/her original country with that of students from other groups in their countries, the difference will be much less significant.

I get that you are supporting my position that asian success is not th3e result of cheating, but...
While selection bias certainly has something to do with indian and filipino success, it doesn't explain everything.
Like, how would you explain the academic success of second generation vietnamese?

My wild ass guess is that culture has something to do with it. Thousands of years of education being the primary form of social mobility gives people from confucian cultures a level of faith in educations that allows them to make painful sacrifices that others will not make.

Yes, only losers would think that people could cheat into TJ, winning STEM competitions, or succeeding at top corporations.

I don't reject the effects of cultural factors, but I think the selection and survivorship effects are dominating here. Those effects may fade away over time but it takes a lot more than 2 generations to disappear.

Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that I am not sure exists here.
I think some groups have far more selection bias than others.
Currently, there is a ton of selection bias in determining which south asians immigrate.
I don't think there is much, if any, selection bias in which vietnamese are here vs still in vietnam.
The other asian groups are somewhere in between.
However the primary source of the differences between whites and asian americans is effort not cognitive ability or SES.

Here is a peer reviewed study that explains that the differences in academic achievement results primarily (not necessarily exclusively) from a difference in effort. That difference is a result of a difference in cultural attitudes about education.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1406402111

If you read about Vietnamese refugees in the US, you will see the hell journey that they went through to be here after the Vietnam War. From 300 thousand to 1 million of them died at sea. They also spent years living in refugee camps before they found a way to the US. That life experience greatly influenced the families of Vietnamese refugees. I don't reject the effects of cultural factors. However, Asian immigrants often have to go through more challenging paths to the US than other groups. Also, only those who possess the necessary traits to adapt and succeed can remain in the US, while many others have to return to their home countries. This is what I mean by survivorship bias.

Some never even attempt or consider the move in the first place.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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."

3. Quant-Q was selected because FCPS was looking for ways to level the playing field - so kids who can't afford expensive test prep programs would have a chance:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/
“The firm that markets the math portion of the test, Quant-Q, doesn’t release materials to the public, a practice that should make them harder for test-prep schools to crack.”

That stance walks on cultural thin ice:

1. Some will believe that it is funethical 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.

What do you mean by the word “cultural”? I can’t think of any culture on earth that tell kids it’s okay to promise you will not do something and then do it anyway. My parents taught me that that’s dishonest and my experience has been that that is what children are taught all over the world.

Let me give you a couple of relatively extreme examples to show you why your reasoning doesn't make sense:

First, imagine that an authority figure touches a child in an inappropriate way, then tells them that they must not tell their parents. Anyone with a shred of morality should be able to see that it's ok if the child broke this "rule," and they would not consider the rule to have any inherent legitimacy because it would stand to violate deeper rights.

Second, the speed limit is a rule that everyone agrees to follow. Someone sees a 35mph speed limit sign. Is it fundamentally unacceptable for them to drive 4-5mph over the posted limit? You could say yes, but the vast majority of the Northern Virginia population does not, at least as far as empirical evidence would suggest. While it may technically be a rule, most people do not consider it serious enough of a violation to give a second thought.

How do these examples come into play in this situation? Depending on your culture, you may not see it as the testing company's business to require you to keep quiet about what you've seen. Since it's the only pathway to TJ, you don't have the option to avoid the test, thus the testing company doesn't have the right to make you keep quiet. Likewise, since talking about what you've seen on a test after everyone's done with the test is normal in some cultures, the idea that it might be violating some NDA may be viewed as a negligible offense - if they wanted a real NDA, wait until the students grow up and apply for real jobs.

You can moralize about dishonesty all you want, but in this case it is absolutely more of a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than of your integrity.

I’m still waiting for an answer as to the culture is being referred to in the above post and what cultural perspective doesn’t see dishonesty as a measure of integrity.

Still waiting for an answer from the poster a few posts above who says that dishonesty is more a reflection of your cultural perspective rather than a measure of integrity. What culture is that poster talking about?

It is pretty clear that the poster was talking about indians. He specifically singled out a kumon type school that is almost entirely indian. I am pretty sure they would have said the same about any over-achieving group because no single group can be better than any other group at anything, any differences are entirely the result of differences in oppression.

East asians encountered this "they must be cheating" narrative until the indians started outperforming east asains. It was so common that it became a racist trope.
It took a while to identify it as racism because the racism was coming form the left. The racists sometimes didn't realize they were being racist, they thought they were being "allies" to other minority groups.

There is no special explanation for the performance of Asian students. It's all because of how immigration works in this country. A large number of Asian students are from families of immigrants. Most Asian immigrants coming to the states are pretty recent and as either college students or skilled workers. They simply don't have other immigration options as other groups. Therefore, who can come and survive here are likely well educated, motivated, and hard working. Those traits and qualities influence their kids and their performance.

This is simply selection bias and survivorship bias. If you compare the performance of an average Asian student in his/her original country with that of students from other groups in their countries, the difference will be much less significant.

I get that you are supporting my position that asian success is not th3e result of cheating, but...
While selection bias certainly has something to do with indian and filipino success, it doesn't explain everything.
Like, how would you explain the academic success of second generation vietnamese?

My wild ass guess is that culture has something to do with it. Thousands of years of education being the primary form of social mobility gives people from confucian cultures a level of faith in educations that allows them to make painful sacrifices that others will not make.

Yes, only losers would think that people could cheat into TJ, winning STEM competitions, or succeeding at top corporations.

I don't reject the effects of cultural factors, but I think the selection and survivorship effects are dominating here. Those effects may fade away over time but it takes a lot more than 2 generations to disappear.

Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that I am not sure exists here.
I think some groups have far more selection bias than others.
Currently, there is a ton of selection bias in determining which south asians immigrate.
I don't think there is much, if any, selection bias in which vietnamese are here vs still in vietnam.
The other asian groups are somewhere in between.
However the primary source of the differences between whites and asian americans is effort not cognitive ability or SES.

Here is a peer reviewed study that explains that the differences in academic achievement results primarily (not necessarily exclusively) from a difference in effort. That difference is a result of a difference in cultural attitudes about education.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1406402111

If you read about Vietnamese refugees in the US, you will see the hell journey that they went through to be here after the Vietnam War. From 300 thousand to 1 million of them died at sea. They also spent years living in refugee camps before they found a way to the US. That life experience greatly influenced the families of Vietnamese refugees. I don't reject the effects of cultural factors. However, Asian immigrants often have to go through more challenging paths to the US than other groups. Also, only those who possess the necessary traits to adapt and succeed can remain in the US, while many others have to return to their home countries. This is what I mean by survivorship bias.

You may not be rejecting the effects of cultural factors but you are discounting them aren't you?
I mean that link is to a peer reviewed paper presented at the proceedings of the national academy of science that concludes pretty unequivocally that the primary source of the "asian advantage" over whites is not their parent's SES or group differences in IQ, it is effort.