Anonymous wrote:So absolutely absurd to not push kids to do advanced stuff. Especially since some average people are deciding the standards.
Push your kids to do well in school, on screener tests, and everywhere, becait will make them better at the end. They will learn about themselves the most.
Go for Algebra in 7th, even in 6th if you can.
LA should have better acceleration too.
Yes ! Yes ! Yes ! For goodness sake,where would Bill Gates be without a college degree ?! Push ! Push ! Push !
Bill Gates did programming in high school...when that was almost unheard of. sometimes it is good to be silent rather than parade your ignorance.
+1
Bill Gates was programming since he was 13 years old. He forgot to check his privilege, bow down to "equity officers" and stop his accelerated education. He should have studied "Equity, Inclusivity and Diversity".
Down with success.
These days, you get more "public support" if you are trans, queer or some minority group than if you are motivated passionate student.
That's what the pro-privilege parents like to tell themselves.
You are serious about "privilege" how about dropping preference for children of alumni at universities? That goes a long way in increasing the capacity that is available to others.
How about actually helping minorities and economically disadvantaged from pre-k and in FCPS from k onwards with extra additional support. Special after school programs, additional hours, tutors, etc. right from k. Actively put money towards education of these children, who deserve this kind of support at an early age which builds a solid foundation.
But no, what you want is really signal your woke status and pretend to help. Getting 50 kids to TJ from these groups would allow you to signal your own moral superiority. All the tens of thousands of other kids from these groups who need help are ignored. There is no story there.
My child and I help coach kids at an elementary school in math from 3rd grade and many kids show a big improvement and lose fear of math. Many are economically disadvantaged. Some actively love math competitions. It is very little effort on our part actually. FCPS could scale this 1000x with a little investment. But no this is too low level and not much woke signaling is possible here. So they would rather focus on getting a few more kids to TJ to signal their wokeness.
Good points. grunt work isn't woke/cool.
Agree, grunt work isn't cool, but if you're happy with your kid doing worksheets instead of learning something meaningful go for it.
This has always been my difficulty with the attitude of TJ parents. It always seems like they are more concerned with setting a high floor for their child's achievement and potential than cultivating the possibility of a high ceiling. It's as though they're terrified that if their child doesn't end up as a doctor, lawyer, or full-stack web developer, that they're going to be working at a 7-11 or a drive thru. It's so myopic and it results in their kids not achieving what they could.
The poster spoke about doing the grunt work early so that kids can be helped over a longer period of time, build a good foundation and lose their fear of math. You are just saying something different. some fancy high horse stuff. care to elaborate in any case - what is cultivating high ceiling? seems like fun. i am guessing it doesn't involve work(sheets).
I appreciate your acknowledgment that you're unfamiliar with the concept - too few on this board are willing to own up to it.
What I'm referring to by prioritizing a high floor over a high ceiling is the preference for financial security and stability over the pursuit of dreams and greatness. The two are not mutually exclusive goals but the tendency is for TJ parents to treat them as such and push their children toward the former.
you seem to mean well. but have no idea how dreams and greatness is achieved. it is never pretty.
It’s never pretty, but it also never involves parents forcing their kids into fields they don’t care about just to maintain a high floor for earning potential.
maybe. reflective of a scrappy immigrant population for whom education has been a key to achieving (or trying to achieve) the American dream. you will have more ballet dancers in the next generation.
Yeah. I buy that argument when you're talking about the under-resourced and economically disadvantaged Asian population that the new TJ admissions process was intended to - and successfully did! - help. (Remember, poor Asians were statistically the biggest beneficiaries of the new admissions process.)
I don't buy it when you're talking about families out in Ashburn who drive their kids to private school in their tricked-out Tesla while trying to shoehorn them into STEM.
Your selective choosing doesn't change the facts - these parents are mostly first gen immigrants. just because they are doing better than you, you are envious.
I highly doubt they’re doing better than me, based on how they treat their children. They might have more money than me, but I REALLY doubt that they’re doing better.
Clutching at straws.
Nope. Just really happy and fulfilled.
PP. You are being racist right now, regardless of how much your white self wants to deny it. If you faced even 25% of the discrimination that Asian-American professionals faced every day, you wouldn't bother posting such bigoted comments. Here's a peek, since you seem ignorant and oblivious:
The working Asian woman is often expected to be not only compliant and a workhorse but also neutral, innocuous, devoid of personality. To hire one of us is to hire someone you don’t have to worry about, as far as “bad behavior” goes, because we’re not really seen as people. The obvious but tedious fact is that some of us are conditioned to work much harder than others because some of us have a lot more to prove.
[…]
I couldn’t help but be annoyed that, somehow, one of us had failed to live up to the image of the compliant Asian woman.
Millennial and woke culture demand that I not feel this way. I should push back against all stereotypes and force others to see Asians as much, much more. Of course, we are much, much more, but to erase the model minority completely would be to erase many people I know, including part of myself.
It would erase someone like my father, who, in China, in his thirties, wrote dozens of letters to Western professors, promising to work as hard as five grad students, etc., if his student visa was sponsored. My father ended up studying in Australia, where he impressed his adviser enough to earn a recommendation to a postdoctoral position in the States. Had my father not worked so hard to improve our means, would I have the luxury of writing these words about him today?
PP. None of this is news to me, and none of it is relevant to this conversation.
I do not have a problem with Asian-American people. I have a problem with people who insist that the only acceptable ways to evaluate students for their suitability for an outstanding academic environment are measures that can be deeply influenced by wealth and family privilege. A fair number of those people are not Asians.
And a very strong number of the people who agree with me in my endeavors - which, to your chagrin, have been largely successful - are Asian themselves.
The key variable for me is your attitude, not your race. If you are a person who believes that exclusive access to elite educational opportunities should be added to the laundry list of other societal advantages enjoyed by people with high amounts of disposable income, then you and I are not going to agree on much.
But if the majority of the people who hold that backwards attitude happen to be Asian, understand that your race is not the reason for my animus towards you. It's your feudalist belief that the family into which you're born should determine your future.
I tend to find that most Asian families that are focused on achievement and test scores as markers are not basing the idea on family status but on test scores and test scores alone. Families sacrifice a lot so that the oldest child can receive tutoring and attend classes and receive the support in order to do well on exams and earn entry to the best schools and best jobs. It is easier for families with money then families that are struggling to get by but the emphasis is the same.
China is currently dealing with a population contraction and part of the reason is that parents understand that their kids have the best chance for success by doing well on the exams at different grade levels. Parents are pouring money into tutoring and enrichment to increase their childs chances of scoring high and moving onto the best level possible. The cost of this has led many parents to not have additional children even after the one child mandate was dropped. The Government has noticed this and has passed laws that prevent tutoring and after school enrichment in order to decrease the cost of having a child. People have found work arounds but there is additional stress for the tutors and the families because they are worried about being arrested for violating the law.
This is very much a cultural issue. You can find scrolls discussing people who were tutored for years, into their 30’s, in order to pass the tests needed for entering the government. They make that State Department Civil Service exam look reasonable by comparison. The same attitude exists in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and India. I am sure it exists in other Asian cultures but those are the ones I know of from personal experience and reading in the newspaper. South Korea shuts down airplane traffic at the time of the national exams so there are no distractions for the kids taking the exams.
It is culturally very different. It just is. And you can argue that the US is different then China/Japan/S Korea/India all you want but the US is about bringing people from different parts of the world and absorbing their cultures into ours. I don’t see the US ever becoming like Europe (A levels anyone) or Asia but it is foolish to think that there is not going to be a culture clash on something as important as education with families that come from cultures with a long standing history of placing an emphasis on merit through testing.
Oh, absolutely. It’s a huge culture clash. My assertion (shared overwhelmingly by those who study education) is that testing is an extremely narrow and limited way to evaluate candidates. It is a very time-honored and old-school way to go about the selection process - and it is outdated. In many ways it’s been ruined by the test-prep industry.
I thought TJ had a multi tiered broad process in which testing was just one element.
They did previously, but the testing element was an eliminating factor at the first stage. So when scores were artificially inflated, those scores kicked other kids out of the process.
But that was a design feature not a bug.
It wasn't a feature. The Admissions Office adopted the Quant-Q because it was a secured exam that didn't rely on advancement in math. In theory, a kid in PreCalc wouldn't have an advantage over a kid in Algebra on this exam because it doesn't rely on concepts that go beyond very early Algebra. It tests how you are at solving problems that you've never seen before. For these reasons, it was a PERFECT exam for eliminating the impact of the exam prep complex.
But when the Curie kids brought the exam questions that they had back to their teachers at Curie (after signing a statement saying they wouldn't do just that), the teachers were able to develop a question bank where they could show their investors how to solve the types of problems that would be on the Quant-Q, rendering it completely useless. This is why some kids have reported having seen the questions before; the makers of the Quant-Q publish multiple forms of the exam but they draw from a larger question bank that does repeat from time to time.
The impact was that the percentage of Asian students went from:
c/o 2021: 74.9% (the highest ever)
c/o 2022: 65.2% (the lowest in six years)
c/o 2023: 72.4%
c/o 2024: 73.2%
This, of course, aligns with Curie's number of admitted students:
c/o 2022: 50
c/o 2023: 95
c/o 2024: 133
Yes, and it wasn't secured at all. Many kids claim to have seen the test prior to taking it since the prep centers were building question banks after illegally debriefing students each year.
Anonymous wrote:So absolutely absurd to not push kids to do advanced stuff. Especially since some average people are deciding the standards.
Push your kids to do well in school, on screener tests, and everywhere, becait will make them better at the end. They will learn about themselves the most.
Go for Algebra in 7th, even in 6th if you can.
LA should have better acceleration too.
Yes ! Yes ! Yes ! For goodness sake,where would Bill Gates be without a college degree ?! Push ! Push ! Push !
Bill Gates did programming in high school...when that was almost unheard of. sometimes it is good to be silent rather than parade your ignorance.
+1
Bill Gates was programming since he was 13 years old. He forgot to check his privilege, bow down to "equity officers" and stop his accelerated education. He should have studied "Equity, Inclusivity and Diversity".
Down with success.
These days, you get more "public support" if you are trans, queer or some minority group than if you are motivated passionate student.
That's what the pro-privilege parents like to tell themselves.
You are serious about "privilege" how about dropping preference for children of alumni at universities? That goes a long way in increasing the capacity that is available to others.
How about actually helping minorities and economically disadvantaged from pre-k and in FCPS from k onwards with extra additional support. Special after school programs, additional hours, tutors, etc. right from k. Actively put money towards education of these children, who deserve this kind of support at an early age which builds a solid foundation.
But no, what you want is really signal your woke status and pretend to help. Getting 50 kids to TJ from these groups would allow you to signal your own moral superiority. All the tens of thousands of other kids from these groups who need help are ignored. There is no story there.
My child and I help coach kids at an elementary school in math from 3rd grade and many kids show a big improvement and lose fear of math. Many are economically disadvantaged. Some actively love math competitions. It is very little effort on our part actually. FCPS could scale this 1000x with a little investment. But no this is too low level and not much woke signaling is possible here. So they would rather focus on getting a few more kids to TJ to signal their wokeness.
Good points. grunt work isn't woke/cool.
Agree, grunt work isn't cool, but if you're happy with your kid doing worksheets instead of learning something meaningful go for it.
This has always been my difficulty with the attitude of TJ parents. It always seems like they are more concerned with setting a high floor for their child's achievement and potential than cultivating the possibility of a high ceiling. It's as though they're terrified that if their child doesn't end up as a doctor, lawyer, or full-stack web developer, that they're going to be working at a 7-11 or a drive thru. It's so myopic and it results in their kids not achieving what they could.
The poster spoke about doing the grunt work early so that kids can be helped over a longer period of time, build a good foundation and lose their fear of math. You are just saying something different. some fancy high horse stuff. care to elaborate in any case - what is cultivating high ceiling? seems like fun. i am guessing it doesn't involve work(sheets).
I appreciate your acknowledgment that you're unfamiliar with the concept - too few on this board are willing to own up to it.
What I'm referring to by prioritizing a high floor over a high ceiling is the preference for financial security and stability over the pursuit of dreams and greatness. The two are not mutually exclusive goals but the tendency is for TJ parents to treat them as such and push their children toward the former.
you seem to mean well. but have no idea how dreams and greatness is achieved. it is never pretty.
It’s never pretty, but it also never involves parents forcing their kids into fields they don’t care about just to maintain a high floor for earning potential.
maybe. reflective of a scrappy immigrant population for whom education has been a key to achieving (or trying to achieve) the American dream. you will have more ballet dancers in the next generation.
Yeah. I buy that argument when you're talking about the under-resourced and economically disadvantaged Asian population that the new TJ admissions process was intended to - and successfully did! - help. (Remember, poor Asians were statistically the biggest beneficiaries of the new admissions process.)
I don't buy it when you're talking about families out in Ashburn who drive their kids to private school in their tricked-out Tesla while trying to shoehorn them into STEM.
Your selective choosing doesn't change the facts - these parents are mostly first gen immigrants. just because they are doing better than you, you are envious.
I highly doubt they’re doing better than me, based on how they treat their children. They might have more money than me, but I REALLY doubt that they’re doing better.
Clutching at straws.
Nope. Just really happy and fulfilled.
PP. You are being racist right now, regardless of how much your white self wants to deny it. If you faced even 25% of the discrimination that Asian-American professionals faced every day, you wouldn't bother posting such bigoted comments. Here's a peek, since you seem ignorant and oblivious:
The working Asian woman is often expected to be not only compliant and a workhorse but also neutral, innocuous, devoid of personality. To hire one of us is to hire someone you don’t have to worry about, as far as “bad behavior” goes, because we’re not really seen as people. The obvious but tedious fact is that some of us are conditioned to work much harder than others because some of us have a lot more to prove.
[…]
I couldn’t help but be annoyed that, somehow, one of us had failed to live up to the image of the compliant Asian woman.
Millennial and woke culture demand that I not feel this way. I should push back against all stereotypes and force others to see Asians as much, much more. Of course, we are much, much more, but to erase the model minority completely would be to erase many people I know, including part of myself.
It would erase someone like my father, who, in China, in his thirties, wrote dozens of letters to Western professors, promising to work as hard as five grad students, etc., if his student visa was sponsored. My father ended up studying in Australia, where he impressed his adviser enough to earn a recommendation to a postdoctoral position in the States. Had my father not worked so hard to improve our means, would I have the luxury of writing these words about him today?
PP. None of this is news to me, and none of it is relevant to this conversation.
I do not have a problem with Asian-American people. I have a problem with people who insist that the only acceptable ways to evaluate students for their suitability for an outstanding academic environment are measures that can be deeply influenced by wealth and family privilege. A fair number of those people are not Asians.
And a very strong number of the people who agree with me in my endeavors - which, to your chagrin, have been largely successful - are Asian themselves.
The key variable for me is your attitude, not your race. If you are a person who believes that exclusive access to elite educational opportunities should be added to the laundry list of other societal advantages enjoyed by people with high amounts of disposable income, then you and I are not going to agree on much.
But if the majority of the people who hold that backwards attitude happen to be Asian, understand that your race is not the reason for my animus towards you. It's your feudalist belief that the family into which you're born should determine your future.
I tend to find that most Asian families that are focused on achievement and test scores as markers are not basing the idea on family status but on test scores and test scores alone. Families sacrifice a lot so that the oldest child can receive tutoring and attend classes and receive the support in order to do well on exams and earn entry to the best schools and best jobs. It is easier for families with money then families that are struggling to get by but the emphasis is the same.
China is currently dealing with a population contraction and part of the reason is that parents understand that their kids have the best chance for success by doing well on the exams at different grade levels. Parents are pouring money into tutoring and enrichment to increase their childs chances of scoring high and moving onto the best level possible. The cost of this has led many parents to not have additional children even after the one child mandate was dropped. The Government has noticed this and has passed laws that prevent tutoring and after school enrichment in order to decrease the cost of having a child. People have found work arounds but there is additional stress for the tutors and the families because they are worried about being arrested for violating the law.
This is very much a cultural issue. You can find scrolls discussing people who were tutored for years, into their 30’s, in order to pass the tests needed for entering the government. They make that State Department Civil Service exam look reasonable by comparison. The same attitude exists in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and India. I am sure it exists in other Asian cultures but those are the ones I know of from personal experience and reading in the newspaper. South Korea shuts down airplane traffic at the time of the national exams so there are no distractions for the kids taking the exams.
It is culturally very different. It just is. And you can argue that the US is different then China/Japan/S Korea/India all you want but the US is about bringing people from different parts of the world and absorbing their cultures into ours. I don’t see the US ever becoming like Europe (A levels anyone) or Asia but it is foolish to think that there is not going to be a culture clash on something as important as education with families that come from cultures with a long standing history of placing an emphasis on merit through testing.
Oh, absolutely. It’s a huge culture clash. My assertion (shared overwhelmingly by those who study education) is that testing is an extremely narrow and limited way to evaluate candidates. It is a very time-honored and old-school way to go about the selection process - and it is outdated. In many ways it’s been ruined by the test-prep industry.
I thought TJ had a multi tiered broad process in which testing was just one element.
They did previously, but the testing element was an eliminating factor at the first stage. So when scores were artificially inflated, those scores kicked other kids out of the process.
But that was a design feature not a bug.
It wasn't a feature. The Admissions Office adopted the Quant-Q because it was a secured exam that didn't rely on advancement in math. In theory, a kid in PreCalc wouldn't have an advantage over a kid in Algebra on this exam because it doesn't rely on concepts that go beyond very early Algebra. It tests how you are at solving problems that you've never seen before. For these reasons, it was a PERFECT exam for eliminating the impact of the exam prep complex.
But when the Curie kids brought the exam questions that they had back to their teachers at Curie (after signing a statement saying they wouldn't do just that), the teachers were able to develop a question bank where they could show their investors how to solve the types of problems that would be on the Quant-Q, rendering it completely useless. This is why some kids have reported having seen the questions before; the makers of the Quant-Q publish multiple forms of the exam but they draw from a larger question bank that does repeat from time to time.
The impact was that the percentage of Asian students went from:
c/o 2021: 74.9% (the highest ever)
c/o 2022: 65.2% (the lowest in six years)
c/o 2023: 72.4%
c/o 2024: 73.2%
This, of course, aligns with Curie's number of admitted students:
c/o 2022: 50
c/o 2023: 95
c/o 2024: 133
Yes, and it wasn't secured at all. Many kids claim to have seen the test prior to taking it since the prep centers were building question banks after illegally debriefing students each year.
Anonymous wrote:So absolutely absurd to not push kids to do advanced stuff. Especially since some average people are deciding the standards.
Push your kids to do well in school, on screener tests, and everywhere, becait will make them better at the end. They will learn about themselves the most.
Go for Algebra in 7th, even in 6th if you can.
LA should have better acceleration too.
Yes ! Yes ! Yes ! For goodness sake,where would Bill Gates be without a college degree ?! Push ! Push ! Push !
Bill Gates did programming in high school...when that was almost unheard of. sometimes it is good to be silent rather than parade your ignorance.
+1
Bill Gates was programming since he was 13 years old. He forgot to check his privilege, bow down to "equity officers" and stop his accelerated education. He should have studied "Equity, Inclusivity and Diversity".
Down with success.
These days, you get more "public support" if you are trans, queer or some minority group than if you are motivated passionate student.
That's what the pro-privilege parents like to tell themselves.
You are serious about "privilege" how about dropping preference for children of alumni at universities? That goes a long way in increasing the capacity that is available to others.
How about actually helping minorities and economically disadvantaged from pre-k and in FCPS from k onwards with extra additional support. Special after school programs, additional hours, tutors, etc. right from k. Actively put money towards education of these children, who deserve this kind of support at an early age which builds a solid foundation.
But no, what you want is really signal your woke status and pretend to help. Getting 50 kids to TJ from these groups would allow you to signal your own moral superiority. All the tens of thousands of other kids from these groups who need help are ignored. There is no story there.
My child and I help coach kids at an elementary school in math from 3rd grade and many kids show a big improvement and lose fear of math. Many are economically disadvantaged. Some actively love math competitions. It is very little effort on our part actually. FCPS could scale this 1000x with a little investment. But no this is too low level and not much woke signaling is possible here. So they would rather focus on getting a few more kids to TJ to signal their wokeness.
Good points. grunt work isn't woke/cool.
Agree, grunt work isn't cool, but if you're happy with your kid doing worksheets instead of learning something meaningful go for it.
This has always been my difficulty with the attitude of TJ parents. It always seems like they are more concerned with setting a high floor for their child's achievement and potential than cultivating the possibility of a high ceiling. It's as though they're terrified that if their child doesn't end up as a doctor, lawyer, or full-stack web developer, that they're going to be working at a 7-11 or a drive thru. It's so myopic and it results in their kids not achieving what they could.
The poster spoke about doing the grunt work early so that kids can be helped over a longer period of time, build a good foundation and lose their fear of math. You are just saying something different. some fancy high horse stuff. care to elaborate in any case - what is cultivating high ceiling? seems like fun. i am guessing it doesn't involve work(sheets).
I appreciate your acknowledgment that you're unfamiliar with the concept - too few on this board are willing to own up to it.
What I'm referring to by prioritizing a high floor over a high ceiling is the preference for financial security and stability over the pursuit of dreams and greatness. The two are not mutually exclusive goals but the tendency is for TJ parents to treat them as such and push their children toward the former.
you seem to mean well. but have no idea how dreams and greatness is achieved. it is never pretty.
It’s never pretty, but it also never involves parents forcing their kids into fields they don’t care about just to maintain a high floor for earning potential.
maybe. reflective of a scrappy immigrant population for whom education has been a key to achieving (or trying to achieve) the American dream. you will have more ballet dancers in the next generation.
Yeah. I buy that argument when you're talking about the under-resourced and economically disadvantaged Asian population that the new TJ admissions process was intended to - and successfully did! - help. (Remember, poor Asians were statistically the biggest beneficiaries of the new admissions process.)
I don't buy it when you're talking about families out in Ashburn who drive their kids to private school in their tricked-out Tesla while trying to shoehorn them into STEM.
Your selective choosing doesn't change the facts - these parents are mostly first gen immigrants. just because they are doing better than you, you are envious.
I highly doubt they’re doing better than me, based on how they treat their children. They might have more money than me, but I REALLY doubt that they’re doing better.
Clutching at straws.
Nope. Just really happy and fulfilled.
PP. You are being racist right now, regardless of how much your white self wants to deny it. If you faced even 25% of the discrimination that Asian-American professionals faced every day, you wouldn't bother posting such bigoted comments. Here's a peek, since you seem ignorant and oblivious:
The working Asian woman is often expected to be not only compliant and a workhorse but also neutral, innocuous, devoid of personality. To hire one of us is to hire someone you don’t have to worry about, as far as “bad behavior” goes, because we’re not really seen as people. The obvious but tedious fact is that some of us are conditioned to work much harder than others because some of us have a lot more to prove.
[…]
I couldn’t help but be annoyed that, somehow, one of us had failed to live up to the image of the compliant Asian woman.
Millennial and woke culture demand that I not feel this way. I should push back against all stereotypes and force others to see Asians as much, much more. Of course, we are much, much more, but to erase the model minority completely would be to erase many people I know, including part of myself.
It would erase someone like my father, who, in China, in his thirties, wrote dozens of letters to Western professors, promising to work as hard as five grad students, etc., if his student visa was sponsored. My father ended up studying in Australia, where he impressed his adviser enough to earn a recommendation to a postdoctoral position in the States. Had my father not worked so hard to improve our means, would I have the luxury of writing these words about him today?
PP. None of this is news to me, and none of it is relevant to this conversation.
I do not have a problem with Asian-American people. I have a problem with people who insist that the only acceptable ways to evaluate students for their suitability for an outstanding academic environment are measures that can be deeply influenced by wealth and family privilege. A fair number of those people are not Asians.
And a very strong number of the people who agree with me in my endeavors - which, to your chagrin, have been largely successful - are Asian themselves.
The key variable for me is your attitude, not your race. If you are a person who believes that exclusive access to elite educational opportunities should be added to the laundry list of other societal advantages enjoyed by people with high amounts of disposable income, then you and I are not going to agree on much.
But if the majority of the people who hold that backwards attitude happen to be Asian, understand that your race is not the reason for my animus towards you. It's your feudalist belief that the family into which you're born should determine your future.
I tend to find that most Asian families that are focused on achievement and test scores as markers are not basing the idea on family status but on test scores and test scores alone. Families sacrifice a lot so that the oldest child can receive tutoring and attend classes and receive the support in order to do well on exams and earn entry to the best schools and best jobs. It is easier for families with money then families that are struggling to get by but the emphasis is the same.
China is currently dealing with a population contraction and part of the reason is that parents understand that their kids have the best chance for success by doing well on the exams at different grade levels. Parents are pouring money into tutoring and enrichment to increase their childs chances of scoring high and moving onto the best level possible. The cost of this has led many parents to not have additional children even after the one child mandate was dropped. The Government has noticed this and has passed laws that prevent tutoring and after school enrichment in order to decrease the cost of having a child. People have found work arounds but there is additional stress for the tutors and the families because they are worried about being arrested for violating the law.
This is very much a cultural issue. You can find scrolls discussing people who were tutored for years, into their 30’s, in order to pass the tests needed for entering the government. They make that State Department Civil Service exam look reasonable by comparison. The same attitude exists in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and India. I am sure it exists in other Asian cultures but those are the ones I know of from personal experience and reading in the newspaper. South Korea shuts down airplane traffic at the time of the national exams so there are no distractions for the kids taking the exams.
It is culturally very different. It just is. And you can argue that the US is different then China/Japan/S Korea/India all you want but the US is about bringing people from different parts of the world and absorbing their cultures into ours. I don’t see the US ever becoming like Europe (A levels anyone) or Asia but it is foolish to think that there is not going to be a culture clash on something as important as education with families that come from cultures with a long standing history of placing an emphasis on merit through testing.
Oh, absolutely. It’s a huge culture clash. My assertion (shared overwhelmingly by those who study education) is that testing is an extremely narrow and limited way to evaluate candidates. It is a very time-honored and old-school way to go about the selection process - and it is outdated. In many ways it’s been ruined by the test-prep industry.
I thought TJ had a multi tiered broad process in which testing was just one element.
They did previously, but the testing element was an eliminating factor at the first stage. So when scores were artificially inflated, those scores kicked other kids out of the process.
But that was a design feature not a bug.
It wasn't a feature. The Admissions Office adopted the Quant-Q because it was a secured exam that didn't rely on advancement in math. In theory, a kid in PreCalc wouldn't have an advantage over a kid in Algebra on this exam because it doesn't rely on concepts that go beyond very early Algebra. It tests how you are at solving problems that you've never seen before. For these reasons, it was a PERFECT exam for eliminating the impact of the exam prep complex.
But when the Curie kids brought the exam questions that they had back to their teachers at Curie (after signing a statement saying they wouldn't do just that), the teachers were able to develop a question bank where they could show their investors how to solve the types of problems that would be on the Quant-Q, rendering it completely useless. This is why some kids have reported having seen the questions before; the makers of the Quant-Q publish multiple forms of the exam but they draw from a larger question bank that does repeat from time to time.
The impact was that the percentage of Asian students went from:
c/o 2021: 74.9% (the highest ever)
c/o 2022: 65.2% (the lowest in six years)
c/o 2023: 72.4%
c/o 2024: 73.2%
This, of course, aligns with Curie's number of admitted students:
c/o 2022: 50
c/o 2023: 95
c/o 2024: 133
Fascinating! Thanks for spedding light on this. I wasn't aware the cheating was so rampant.
Anonymous wrote:So absolutely absurd to not push kids to do advanced stuff. Especially since some average people are deciding the standards.
Push your kids to do well in school, on screener tests, and everywhere, becait will make them better at the end. They will learn about themselves the most.
Go for Algebra in 7th, even in 6th if you can.
LA should have better acceleration too.
Yes ! Yes ! Yes ! For goodness sake,where would Bill Gates be without a college degree ?! Push ! Push ! Push !
Bill Gates did programming in high school...when that was almost unheard of. sometimes it is good to be silent rather than parade your ignorance.
+1
Bill Gates was programming since he was 13 years old. He forgot to check his privilege, bow down to "equity officers" and stop his accelerated education. He should have studied "Equity, Inclusivity and Diversity".
Down with success.
These days, you get more "public support" if you are trans, queer or some minority group than if you are motivated passionate student.
That's what the pro-privilege parents like to tell themselves.
You are serious about "privilege" how about dropping preference for children of alumni at universities? That goes a long way in increasing the capacity that is available to others.
How about actually helping minorities and economically disadvantaged from pre-k and in FCPS from k onwards with extra additional support. Special after school programs, additional hours, tutors, etc. right from k. Actively put money towards education of these children, who deserve this kind of support at an early age which builds a solid foundation.
But no, what you want is really signal your woke status and pretend to help. Getting 50 kids to TJ from these groups would allow you to signal your own moral superiority. All the tens of thousands of other kids from these groups who need help are ignored. There is no story there.
My child and I help coach kids at an elementary school in math from 3rd grade and many kids show a big improvement and lose fear of math. Many are economically disadvantaged. Some actively love math competitions. It is very little effort on our part actually. FCPS could scale this 1000x with a little investment. But no this is too low level and not much woke signaling is possible here. So they would rather focus on getting a few more kids to TJ to signal their wokeness.
Good points. grunt work isn't woke/cool.
Agree, grunt work isn't cool, but if you're happy with your kid doing worksheets instead of learning something meaningful go for it.
This has always been my difficulty with the attitude of TJ parents. It always seems like they are more concerned with setting a high floor for their child's achievement and potential than cultivating the possibility of a high ceiling. It's as though they're terrified that if their child doesn't end up as a doctor, lawyer, or full-stack web developer, that they're going to be working at a 7-11 or a drive thru. It's so myopic and it results in their kids not achieving what they could.
The poster spoke about doing the grunt work early so that kids can be helped over a longer period of time, build a good foundation and lose their fear of math. You are just saying something different. some fancy high horse stuff. care to elaborate in any case - what is cultivating high ceiling? seems like fun. i am guessing it doesn't involve work(sheets).
I appreciate your acknowledgment that you're unfamiliar with the concept - too few on this board are willing to own up to it.
What I'm referring to by prioritizing a high floor over a high ceiling is the preference for financial security and stability over the pursuit of dreams and greatness. The two are not mutually exclusive goals but the tendency is for TJ parents to treat them as such and push their children toward the former.
you seem to mean well. but have no idea how dreams and greatness is achieved. it is never pretty.
It’s never pretty, but it also never involves parents forcing their kids into fields they don’t care about just to maintain a high floor for earning potential.
maybe. reflective of a scrappy immigrant population for whom education has been a key to achieving (or trying to achieve) the American dream. you will have more ballet dancers in the next generation.
Yeah. I buy that argument when you're talking about the under-resourced and economically disadvantaged Asian population that the new TJ admissions process was intended to - and successfully did! - help. (Remember, poor Asians were statistically the biggest beneficiaries of the new admissions process.)
I don't buy it when you're talking about families out in Ashburn who drive their kids to private school in their tricked-out Tesla while trying to shoehorn them into STEM.
Your selective choosing doesn't change the facts - these parents are mostly first gen immigrants. just because they are doing better than you, you are envious.
I highly doubt they’re doing better than me, based on how they treat their children. They might have more money than me, but I REALLY doubt that they’re doing better.
Clutching at straws.
Nope. Just really happy and fulfilled.
PP. You are being racist right now, regardless of how much your white self wants to deny it. If you faced even 25% of the discrimination that Asian-American professionals faced every day, you wouldn't bother posting such bigoted comments. Here's a peek, since you seem ignorant and oblivious:
The working Asian woman is often expected to be not only compliant and a workhorse but also neutral, innocuous, devoid of personality. To hire one of us is to hire someone you don’t have to worry about, as far as “bad behavior” goes, because we’re not really seen as people. The obvious but tedious fact is that some of us are conditioned to work much harder than others because some of us have a lot more to prove.
[…]
I couldn’t help but be annoyed that, somehow, one of us had failed to live up to the image of the compliant Asian woman.
Millennial and woke culture demand that I not feel this way. I should push back against all stereotypes and force others to see Asians as much, much more. Of course, we are much, much more, but to erase the model minority completely would be to erase many people I know, including part of myself.
It would erase someone like my father, who, in China, in his thirties, wrote dozens of letters to Western professors, promising to work as hard as five grad students, etc., if his student visa was sponsored. My father ended up studying in Australia, where he impressed his adviser enough to earn a recommendation to a postdoctoral position in the States. Had my father not worked so hard to improve our means, would I have the luxury of writing these words about him today?
PP. None of this is news to me, and none of it is relevant to this conversation.
I do not have a problem with Asian-American people. I have a problem with people who insist that the only acceptable ways to evaluate students for their suitability for an outstanding academic environment are measures that can be deeply influenced by wealth and family privilege. A fair number of those people are not Asians.
And a very strong number of the people who agree with me in my endeavors - which, to your chagrin, have been largely successful - are Asian themselves.
The key variable for me is your attitude, not your race. If you are a person who believes that exclusive access to elite educational opportunities should be added to the laundry list of other societal advantages enjoyed by people with high amounts of disposable income, then you and I are not going to agree on much.
But if the majority of the people who hold that backwards attitude happen to be Asian, understand that your race is not the reason for my animus towards you. It's your feudalist belief that the family into which you're born should determine your future.
I tend to find that most Asian families that are focused on achievement and test scores as markers are not basing the idea on family status but on test scores and test scores alone. Families sacrifice a lot so that the oldest child can receive tutoring and attend classes and receive the support in order to do well on exams and earn entry to the best schools and best jobs. It is easier for families with money then families that are struggling to get by but the emphasis is the same.
China is currently dealing with a population contraction and part of the reason is that parents understand that their kids have the best chance for success by doing well on the exams at different grade levels. Parents are pouring money into tutoring and enrichment to increase their childs chances of scoring high and moving onto the best level possible. The cost of this has led many parents to not have additional children even after the one child mandate was dropped. The Government has noticed this and has passed laws that prevent tutoring and after school enrichment in order to decrease the cost of having a child. People have found work arounds but there is additional stress for the tutors and the families because they are worried about being arrested for violating the law.
This is very much a cultural issue. You can find scrolls discussing people who were tutored for years, into their 30’s, in order to pass the tests needed for entering the government. They make that State Department Civil Service exam look reasonable by comparison. The same attitude exists in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and India. I am sure it exists in other Asian cultures but those are the ones I know of from personal experience and reading in the newspaper. South Korea shuts down airplane traffic at the time of the national exams so there are no distractions for the kids taking the exams.
It is culturally very different. It just is. And you can argue that the US is different then China/Japan/S Korea/India all you want but the US is about bringing people from different parts of the world and absorbing their cultures into ours. I don’t see the US ever becoming like Europe (A levels anyone) or Asia but it is foolish to think that there is not going to be a culture clash on something as important as education with families that come from cultures with a long standing history of placing an emphasis on merit through testing.
Oh, absolutely. It’s a huge culture clash. My assertion (shared overwhelmingly by those who study education) is that testing is an extremely narrow and limited way to evaluate candidates. It is a very time-honored and old-school way to go about the selection process - and it is outdated. In many ways it’s been ruined by the test-prep industry.
I thought TJ had a multi tiered broad process in which testing was just one element.
They did previously, but the testing element was an eliminating factor at the first stage. So when scores were artificially inflated, those scores kicked other kids out of the process.
But that was a design feature not a bug.
It wasn't a feature. The Admissions Office adopted the Quant-Q because it was a secured exam that didn't rely on advancement in math. In theory, a kid in PreCalc wouldn't have an advantage over a kid in Algebra on this exam because it doesn't rely on concepts that go beyond very early Algebra. It tests how you are at solving problems that you've never seen before. For these reasons, it was a PERFECT exam for eliminating the impact of the exam prep complex.
But when the Curie kids brought the exam questions that they had back to their teachers at Curie (after signing a statement saying they wouldn't do just that), the teachers were able to develop a question bank where they could show their investors how to solve the types of problems that would be on the Quant-Q, rendering it completely useless. This is why some kids have reported having seen the questions before; the makers of the Quant-Q publish multiple forms of the exam but they draw from a larger question bank that does repeat from time to time.
The impact was that the percentage of Asian students went from:
c/o 2021: 74.9% (the highest ever)
c/o 2022: 65.2% (the lowest in six years)
c/o 2023: 72.4%
c/o 2024: 73.2%
This, of course, aligns with Curie's number of admitted students:
c/o 2022: 50
c/o 2023: 95
c/o 2024: 133
Fascinating! Thanks for spedding light on this. I wasn't aware the cheating was so rampant.
PP. I think reasonable people can disagree about whether or not it constituted "cheating" from the perspective of the students and parents who paid for the course. We can't assume that they knew that Curie had obtained the materials unethically, and it goes without saying that Curie has legal cover to do what it did because of plausible deniability, so any investigation into the matter would be pointless.
Anonymous wrote:So absolutely absurd to not push kids to do advanced stuff. Especially since some average people are deciding the standards.
Push your kids to do well in school, on screener tests, and everywhere, becait will make them better at the end. They will learn about themselves the most.
Go for Algebra in 7th, even in 6th if you can.
LA should have better acceleration too.
Yes ! Yes ! Yes ! For goodness sake,where would Bill Gates be without a college degree ?! Push ! Push ! Push !
Bill Gates did programming in high school...when that was almost unheard of. sometimes it is good to be silent rather than parade your ignorance.
+1
Bill Gates was programming since he was 13 years old. He forgot to check his privilege, bow down to "equity officers" and stop his accelerated education. He should have studied "Equity, Inclusivity and Diversity".
Down with success.
These days, you get more "public support" if you are trans, queer or some minority group than if you are motivated passionate student.
That's what the pro-privilege parents like to tell themselves.
You are serious about "privilege" how about dropping preference for children of alumni at universities? That goes a long way in increasing the capacity that is available to others.
How about actually helping minorities and economically disadvantaged from pre-k and in FCPS from k onwards with extra additional support. Special after school programs, additional hours, tutors, etc. right from k. Actively put money towards education of these children, who deserve this kind of support at an early age which builds a solid foundation.
But no, what you want is really signal your woke status and pretend to help. Getting 50 kids to TJ from these groups would allow you to signal your own moral superiority. All the tens of thousands of other kids from these groups who need help are ignored. There is no story there.
My child and I help coach kids at an elementary school in math from 3rd grade and many kids show a big improvement and lose fear of math. Many are economically disadvantaged. Some actively love math competitions. It is very little effort on our part actually. FCPS could scale this 1000x with a little investment. But no this is too low level and not much woke signaling is possible here. So they would rather focus on getting a few more kids to TJ to signal their wokeness.
Good points. grunt work isn't woke/cool.
Agree, grunt work isn't cool, but if you're happy with your kid doing worksheets instead of learning something meaningful go for it.
This has always been my difficulty with the attitude of TJ parents. It always seems like they are more concerned with setting a high floor for their child's achievement and potential than cultivating the possibility of a high ceiling. It's as though they're terrified that if their child doesn't end up as a doctor, lawyer, or full-stack web developer, that they're going to be working at a 7-11 or a drive thru. It's so myopic and it results in their kids not achieving what they could.
The poster spoke about doing the grunt work early so that kids can be helped over a longer period of time, build a good foundation and lose their fear of math. You are just saying something different. some fancy high horse stuff. care to elaborate in any case - what is cultivating high ceiling? seems like fun. i am guessing it doesn't involve work(sheets).
I appreciate your acknowledgment that you're unfamiliar with the concept - too few on this board are willing to own up to it.
What I'm referring to by prioritizing a high floor over a high ceiling is the preference for financial security and stability over the pursuit of dreams and greatness. The two are not mutually exclusive goals but the tendency is for TJ parents to treat them as such and push their children toward the former.
you seem to mean well. but have no idea how dreams and greatness is achieved. it is never pretty.
It’s never pretty, but it also never involves parents forcing their kids into fields they don’t care about just to maintain a high floor for earning potential.
maybe. reflective of a scrappy immigrant population for whom education has been a key to achieving (or trying to achieve) the American dream. you will have more ballet dancers in the next generation.
Yeah. I buy that argument when you're talking about the under-resourced and economically disadvantaged Asian population that the new TJ admissions process was intended to - and successfully did! - help. (Remember, poor Asians were statistically the biggest beneficiaries of the new admissions process.)
I don't buy it when you're talking about families out in Ashburn who drive their kids to private school in their tricked-out Tesla while trying to shoehorn them into STEM.
Your selective choosing doesn't change the facts - these parents are mostly first gen immigrants. just because they are doing better than you, you are envious.
I highly doubt they’re doing better than me, based on how they treat their children. They might have more money than me, but I REALLY doubt that they’re doing better.
Clutching at straws.
Nope. Just really happy and fulfilled.
PP. You are being racist right now, regardless of how much your white self wants to deny it. If you faced even 25% of the discrimination that Asian-American professionals faced every day, you wouldn't bother posting such bigoted comments. Here's a peek, since you seem ignorant and oblivious:
The working Asian woman is often expected to be not only compliant and a workhorse but also neutral, innocuous, devoid of personality. To hire one of us is to hire someone you don’t have to worry about, as far as “bad behavior” goes, because we’re not really seen as people. The obvious but tedious fact is that some of us are conditioned to work much harder than others because some of us have a lot more to prove.
[…]
I couldn’t help but be annoyed that, somehow, one of us had failed to live up to the image of the compliant Asian woman.
Millennial and woke culture demand that I not feel this way. I should push back against all stereotypes and force others to see Asians as much, much more. Of course, we are much, much more, but to erase the model minority completely would be to erase many people I know, including part of myself.
It would erase someone like my father, who, in China, in his thirties, wrote dozens of letters to Western professors, promising to work as hard as five grad students, etc., if his student visa was sponsored. My father ended up studying in Australia, where he impressed his adviser enough to earn a recommendation to a postdoctoral position in the States. Had my father not worked so hard to improve our means, would I have the luxury of writing these words about him today?
PP. None of this is news to me, and none of it is relevant to this conversation.
I do not have a problem with Asian-American people. I have a problem with people who insist that the only acceptable ways to evaluate students for their suitability for an outstanding academic environment are measures that can be deeply influenced by wealth and family privilege. A fair number of those people are not Asians.
And a very strong number of the people who agree with me in my endeavors - which, to your chagrin, have been largely successful - are Asian themselves.
The key variable for me is your attitude, not your race. If you are a person who believes that exclusive access to elite educational opportunities should be added to the laundry list of other societal advantages enjoyed by people with high amounts of disposable income, then you and I are not going to agree on much.
But if the majority of the people who hold that backwards attitude happen to be Asian, understand that your race is not the reason for my animus towards you. It's your feudalist belief that the family into which you're born should determine your future.
I tend to find that most Asian families that are focused on achievement and test scores as markers are not basing the idea on family status but on test scores and test scores alone. Families sacrifice a lot so that the oldest child can receive tutoring and attend classes and receive the support in order to do well on exams and earn entry to the best schools and best jobs. It is easier for families with money then families that are struggling to get by but the emphasis is the same.
China is currently dealing with a population contraction and part of the reason is that parents understand that their kids have the best chance for success by doing well on the exams at different grade levels. Parents are pouring money into tutoring and enrichment to increase their childs chances of scoring high and moving onto the best level possible. The cost of this has led many parents to not have additional children even after the one child mandate was dropped. The Government has noticed this and has passed laws that prevent tutoring and after school enrichment in order to decrease the cost of having a child. People have found work arounds but there is additional stress for the tutors and the families because they are worried about being arrested for violating the law.
This is very much a cultural issue. You can find scrolls discussing people who were tutored for years, into their 30’s, in order to pass the tests needed for entering the government. They make that State Department Civil Service exam look reasonable by comparison. The same attitude exists in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and India. I am sure it exists in other Asian cultures but those are the ones I know of from personal experience and reading in the newspaper. South Korea shuts down airplane traffic at the time of the national exams so there are no distractions for the kids taking the exams.
It is culturally very different. It just is. And you can argue that the US is different then China/Japan/S Korea/India all you want but the US is about bringing people from different parts of the world and absorbing their cultures into ours. I don’t see the US ever becoming like Europe (A levels anyone) or Asia but it is foolish to think that there is not going to be a culture clash on something as important as education with families that come from cultures with a long standing history of placing an emphasis on merit through testing.
Oh, absolutely. It’s a huge culture clash. My assertion (shared overwhelmingly by those who study education) is that testing is an extremely narrow and limited way to evaluate candidates. It is a very time-honored and old-school way to go about the selection process - and it is outdated. In many ways it’s been ruined by the test-prep industry.
I thought TJ had a multi tiered broad process in which testing was just one element.
They did previously, but the testing element was an eliminating factor at the first stage. So when scores were artificially inflated, those scores kicked other kids out of the process.
But that was a design feature not a bug.
It wasn't a feature. The Admissions Office adopted the Quant-Q because it was a secured exam that didn't rely on advancement in math. In theory, a kid in PreCalc wouldn't have an advantage over a kid in Algebra on this exam because it doesn't rely on concepts that go beyond very early Algebra. It tests how you are at solving problems that you've never seen before. For these reasons, it was a PERFECT exam for eliminating the impact of the exam prep complex.
But when the Curie kids brought the exam questions that they had back to their teachers at Curie (after signing a statement saying they wouldn't do just that), the teachers were able to develop a question bank where they could show their investors how to solve the types of problems that would be on the Quant-Q, rendering it completely useless. This is why some kids have reported having seen the questions before; the makers of the Quant-Q publish multiple forms of the exam but they draw from a larger question bank that does repeat from time to time.
The impact was that the percentage of Asian students went from:
c/o 2021: 74.9% (the highest ever)
c/o 2022: 65.2% (the lowest in six years)
c/o 2023: 72.4%
c/o 2024: 73.2%
This, of course, aligns with Curie's number of admitted students:
c/o 2022: 50
c/o 2023: 95
c/o 2024: 133
Fascinating! Thanks for spedding light on this. I wasn't aware the cheating was so rampant.
PP. I think reasonable people can disagree about whether or not it constituted "cheating" from the perspective of the students and parents who paid for the course. We can't assume that they knew that Curie had obtained the materials unethically, and it goes without saying that Curie has legal cover to do what it did because of plausible deniability, so any investigation into the matter would be pointless.
It confers an advantage not available to everyone, so skews the selection process in favor of those who pay for prep, and that's a problem for a publicly funded program that should be equally available to everyone not just those who can afford prep.
Anonymous wrote:So absolutely absurd to not push kids to do advanced stuff. Especially since some average people are deciding the standards.
Push your kids to do well in school, on screener tests, and everywhere, becait will make them better at the end. They will learn about themselves the most.
Go for Algebra in 7th, even in 6th if you can.
LA should have better acceleration too.
Yes ! Yes ! Yes ! For goodness sake,where would Bill Gates be without a college degree ?! Push ! Push ! Push !
Bill Gates did programming in high school...when that was almost unheard of. sometimes it is good to be silent rather than parade your ignorance.
+1
Bill Gates was programming since he was 13 years old. He forgot to check his privilege, bow down to "equity officers" and stop his accelerated education. He should have studied "Equity, Inclusivity and Diversity".
Down with success.
These days, you get more "public support" if you are trans, queer or some minority group than if you are motivated passionate student.
That's what the pro-privilege parents like to tell themselves.
You are serious about "privilege" how about dropping preference for children of alumni at universities? That goes a long way in increasing the capacity that is available to others.
How about actually helping minorities and economically disadvantaged from pre-k and in FCPS from k onwards with extra additional support. Special after school programs, additional hours, tutors, etc. right from k. Actively put money towards education of these children, who deserve this kind of support at an early age which builds a solid foundation.
But no, what you want is really signal your woke status and pretend to help. Getting 50 kids to TJ from these groups would allow you to signal your own moral superiority. All the tens of thousands of other kids from these groups who need help are ignored. There is no story there.
My child and I help coach kids at an elementary school in math from 3rd grade and many kids show a big improvement and lose fear of math. Many are economically disadvantaged. Some actively love math competitions. It is very little effort on our part actually. FCPS could scale this 1000x with a little investment. But no this is too low level and not much woke signaling is possible here. So they would rather focus on getting a few more kids to TJ to signal their wokeness.
Good points. grunt work isn't woke/cool.
Agree, grunt work isn't cool, but if you're happy with your kid doing worksheets instead of learning something meaningful go for it.
This has always been my difficulty with the attitude of TJ parents. It always seems like they are more concerned with setting a high floor for their child's achievement and potential than cultivating the possibility of a high ceiling. It's as though they're terrified that if their child doesn't end up as a doctor, lawyer, or full-stack web developer, that they're going to be working at a 7-11 or a drive thru. It's so myopic and it results in their kids not achieving what they could.
The poster spoke about doing the grunt work early so that kids can be helped over a longer period of time, build a good foundation and lose their fear of math. You are just saying something different. some fancy high horse stuff. care to elaborate in any case - what is cultivating high ceiling? seems like fun. i am guessing it doesn't involve work(sheets).
I appreciate your acknowledgment that you're unfamiliar with the concept - too few on this board are willing to own up to it.
What I'm referring to by prioritizing a high floor over a high ceiling is the preference for financial security and stability over the pursuit of dreams and greatness. The two are not mutually exclusive goals but the tendency is for TJ parents to treat them as such and push their children toward the former.
you seem to mean well. but have no idea how dreams and greatness is achieved. it is never pretty.
It’s never pretty, but it also never involves parents forcing their kids into fields they don’t care about just to maintain a high floor for earning potential.
maybe. reflective of a scrappy immigrant population for whom education has been a key to achieving (or trying to achieve) the American dream. you will have more ballet dancers in the next generation.
Yeah. I buy that argument when you're talking about the under-resourced and economically disadvantaged Asian population that the new TJ admissions process was intended to - and successfully did! - help. (Remember, poor Asians were statistically the biggest beneficiaries of the new admissions process.)
I don't buy it when you're talking about families out in Ashburn who drive their kids to private school in their tricked-out Tesla while trying to shoehorn them into STEM.
Your selective choosing doesn't change the facts - these parents are mostly first gen immigrants. just because they are doing better than you, you are envious.
I highly doubt they’re doing better than me, based on how they treat their children. They might have more money than me, but I REALLY doubt that they’re doing better.
Clutching at straws.
Nope. Just really happy and fulfilled.
PP. You are being racist right now, regardless of how much your white self wants to deny it. If you faced even 25% of the discrimination that Asian-American professionals faced every day, you wouldn't bother posting such bigoted comments. Here's a peek, since you seem ignorant and oblivious:
The working Asian woman is often expected to be not only compliant and a workhorse but also neutral, innocuous, devoid of personality. To hire one of us is to hire someone you don’t have to worry about, as far as “bad behavior” goes, because we’re not really seen as people. The obvious but tedious fact is that some of us are conditioned to work much harder than others because some of us have a lot more to prove.
[…]
I couldn’t help but be annoyed that, somehow, one of us had failed to live up to the image of the compliant Asian woman.
Millennial and woke culture demand that I not feel this way. I should push back against all stereotypes and force others to see Asians as much, much more. Of course, we are much, much more, but to erase the model minority completely would be to erase many people I know, including part of myself.
It would erase someone like my father, who, in China, in his thirties, wrote dozens of letters to Western professors, promising to work as hard as five grad students, etc., if his student visa was sponsored. My father ended up studying in Australia, where he impressed his adviser enough to earn a recommendation to a postdoctoral position in the States. Had my father not worked so hard to improve our means, would I have the luxury of writing these words about him today?
PP. None of this is news to me, and none of it is relevant to this conversation.
I do not have a problem with Asian-American people. I have a problem with people who insist that the only acceptable ways to evaluate students for their suitability for an outstanding academic environment are measures that can be deeply influenced by wealth and family privilege. A fair number of those people are not Asians.
And a very strong number of the people who agree with me in my endeavors - which, to your chagrin, have been largely successful - are Asian themselves.
The key variable for me is your attitude, not your race. If you are a person who believes that exclusive access to elite educational opportunities should be added to the laundry list of other societal advantages enjoyed by people with high amounts of disposable income, then you and I are not going to agree on much.
But if the majority of the people who hold that backwards attitude happen to be Asian, understand that your race is not the reason for my animus towards you. It's your feudalist belief that the family into which you're born should determine your future.
I tend to find that most Asian families that are focused on achievement and test scores as markers are not basing the idea on family status but on test scores and test scores alone. Families sacrifice a lot so that the oldest child can receive tutoring and attend classes and receive the support in order to do well on exams and earn entry to the best schools and best jobs. It is easier for families with money then families that are struggling to get by but the emphasis is the same.
China is currently dealing with a population contraction and part of the reason is that parents understand that their kids have the best chance for success by doing well on the exams at different grade levels. Parents are pouring money into tutoring and enrichment to increase their childs chances of scoring high and moving onto the best level possible. The cost of this has led many parents to not have additional children even after the one child mandate was dropped. The Government has noticed this and has passed laws that prevent tutoring and after school enrichment in order to decrease the cost of having a child. People have found work arounds but there is additional stress for the tutors and the families because they are worried about being arrested for violating the law.
This is very much a cultural issue. You can find scrolls discussing people who were tutored for years, into their 30’s, in order to pass the tests needed for entering the government. They make that State Department Civil Service exam look reasonable by comparison. The same attitude exists in South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and India. I am sure it exists in other Asian cultures but those are the ones I know of from personal experience and reading in the newspaper. South Korea shuts down airplane traffic at the time of the national exams so there are no distractions for the kids taking the exams.
It is culturally very different. It just is. And you can argue that the US is different then China/Japan/S Korea/India all you want but the US is about bringing people from different parts of the world and absorbing their cultures into ours. I don’t see the US ever becoming like Europe (A levels anyone) or Asia but it is foolish to think that there is not going to be a culture clash on something as important as education with families that come from cultures with a long standing history of placing an emphasis on merit through testing.
Oh, absolutely. It’s a huge culture clash. My assertion (shared overwhelmingly by those who study education) is that testing is an extremely narrow and limited way to evaluate candidates. It is a very time-honored and old-school way to go about the selection process - and it is outdated. In many ways it’s been ruined by the test-prep industry.
I thought TJ had a multi tiered broad process in which testing was just one element.
They did previously, but the testing element was an eliminating factor at the first stage. So when scores were artificially inflated, those scores kicked other kids out of the process.
But that was a design feature not a bug.
It wasn't a feature. The Admissions Office adopted the Quant-Q because it was a secured exam that didn't rely on advancement in math. In theory, a kid in PreCalc wouldn't have an advantage over a kid in Algebra on this exam because it doesn't rely on concepts that go beyond very early Algebra. It tests how you are at solving problems that you've never seen before. For these reasons, it was a PERFECT exam for eliminating the impact of the exam prep complex.
But when the Curie kids brought the exam questions that they had back to their teachers at Curie (after signing a statement saying they wouldn't do just that), the teachers were able to develop a question bank where they could show their investors how to solve the types of problems that would be on the Quant-Q, rendering it completely useless. This is why some kids have reported having seen the questions before; the makers of the Quant-Q publish multiple forms of the exam but they draw from a larger question bank that does repeat from time to time.
The impact was that the percentage of Asian students went from:
c/o 2021: 74.9% (the highest ever)
c/o 2022: 65.2% (the lowest in six years)
c/o 2023: 72.4%
c/o 2024: 73.2%
This, of course, aligns with Curie's number of admitted students:
c/o 2022: 50
c/o 2023: 95
c/o 2024: 133
Fascinating! Thanks for spedding light on this. I wasn't aware the cheating was so rampant.
PP. I think reasonable people can disagree about whether or not it constituted "cheating" from the perspective of the students and parents who paid for the course. We can't assume that they knew that Curie had obtained the materials unethically, and it goes without saying that Curie has legal cover to do what it did because of plausible deniability, so any investigation into the matter would be pointless.
It confers an advantage not available to everyone, so skews the selection process in favor of those who pay for prep, and that's a problem for a publicly funded program that should be equally available to everyone not just those who can afford prep.
We agree about all of the above. I just take issue with the word “cheating” because the families didn’t break any rule or really even do anything unethical. Curie did.
The poster failed to list Curie's high numbers for 2025 and 2026. So it wasn't prep for the test alone that was conferring an advantage. This prep was likely just having shown them some sample questions.
They did not buy the test as being repeated by a particular person here. They should go to where the owners of Curie grew up if they really wanted to see what buying a test is like.
Anonymous wrote:The poster failed to list Curie's high numbers for 2025 and 2026. So it wasn't prep for the test alone that was conferring an advantage. This prep was likely just having shown them some sample questions.
Cutie did not publish those numbers along with a list of the first and last names of the admitted students in those years. Those data are less valuable for several fairly obvious reasons.
Anonymous wrote:They did not buy the test as being repeated by a particular person here. They should go to where the owners of Curie grew up if they really wanted to see what buying a test is like.
That's just semantics. They paid Curie they saw the questions Case closed.
Anonymous wrote:They did not buy the test as being repeated by a particular person here. They should go to where the owners of Curie grew up if they really wanted to see what buying a test is like.
It always amazes me when Dr. Rao is actually willing to come on here and post like this. The same goes for Dr. Harry.
Anonymous wrote:They did not buy the test as being repeated by a particular person here. They should go to where the owners of Curie grew up if they really wanted to see what buying a test is like.
It always amazes me when Dr. Rao is actually willing to come on here and post like this. The same goes for Dr. Harry.
your doctoral degree is definitely of a higher quality
Anonymous wrote:So absolutely absurd to not push kids to do advanced stuff. Especially since some average people are deciding the standards.
Push your kids to do well in school, on screener tests, and everywhere, becait will make them better at the end. They will learn about themselves the most.
Go for Algebra in 7th, even in 6th if you can.
LA should have better acceleration too.
Ya, no shame. If you get into TJ, your kid will suffer in math unless he/she is a true genius. Oh, that’s right, it is lottery now, they have to lower the standard in stem classes, yup, you will be fine. Go push! Becuase youth is better spent in books.
Anonymous wrote:So absolutely absurd to not push kids to do advanced stuff. Especially since some average people are deciding the standards.
Push your kids to do well in school, on screener tests, and everywhere, becait will make them better at the end. They will learn about themselves the most.
Go for Algebra in 7th, even in 6th if you can.
LA should have better acceleration too.
Ya, no shame. If you get into TJ, your kid will suffer in math unless he/she is a true genius. Oh, that’s right, it is lottery now, they have to lower the standard in stem classes, yup, you will be fine. Go push! Becuase youth is better spent in books.
You heard wrong. The new process helped them better identify more naturally gifted students which raised the bar. Previously, they were selecting mostly 3rd rate peppers who floundered once at TJ.
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