Positive review for Poolesville SMACS program

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hmm. if it's 400 total across all grades, and local Blair students have to compete along with everyone else into the Magnet program, then I admit I was wrong.

Just to be clear, this was also in the link you posted if you went further down. 430 magnet kids in a school of nearly 3200.

It's a very small program within the largest HS in the county. Unlike TPMS, there is no set aside for in boundary students at Blair. The biggest issue with this program is there aren't more of them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Blair smac sends 5 times more students to mit than PHS smac. That says it all!

I have to agree. The caliber of students at poolesville is no where near the same as Blair, I believe a good part of this reason is the teachers at poolesville smacs are pretty terrible.

Or maybe more students are going to MIT for other reasons... It's not like you can pick between Blair and Poolesville so this discussion is useless.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Both the Poolesville and Blair SMACs are HS choice Magnet programs. Both offer classes that are not offered in other HS curriculum (especially advanced math). Both are non-lottery applications. However, both no longer use a Nationally-recognized test to qualify applicants, since MAP is only an indicator of "grade-level" progress and the course offerings are somewhat static, so it's not really a G-T program per-se, although most G-T kids are "grade-level" advanced, so there is significant overlap.

A factor that some college admissions boards may take note of are the national school rankings. College admissions boards don't normally take the time to examine each HS individually, so will rely upon past performance of students they received as well as well-known national rankings as indicators of success. For the latter, US News is probably the most widely-known national school ranking system, however, GreatSchools, Niche, Patch, etc. all are roughly comparable.

When schools went virtual, the makers of the CogAT test would not allow it to be given online so MCPS had no choice but to cancel it that year. Afterward, they decided to extend that pause to 3 years so they can evaluate whether it was necessary. These days similar tests like SATs have fallen in disfavor with many colleges since they don't provide any new information aside from who took the expensive prep course to improve their scores.

*Shrug* I'm not the one trying to get into a good college, but if you think it's good for your kid(s), okay by me.

These tests don't really tell us anything we didn't already know but act as a gatekeeper for less affluent schools where kids don't typically take CogAT prep classes

And you think parents aren’t prepping for MAP now instead? Getting rid of COGAT a mistake.

Exactly! Also, studying/prepping for MAP is way easier than cogat, especially for the super rich.

Not really I mean learning a ton of math is harder than learning the test format. Also, my sense is the CogAT was more heavily weighted and mostly just kept out poor kids who were talented but didn't prep.

Other way around hun, but it's a good attempt to fool everyone.

Although the Verbal portion might somewhat favor kids who's parents speak English well or prep their kids, the Quantitative and Non-Verbal Battery were designed to help balance out kids who might not have access to tutoring and prep resources. That would be easy to determine by a CogAT screener (ex. a B profile, with verbal as the outlyer).

If anything, I think by dropping CogAT and adopting MAP, MCPS royally screwed kids with fewer access to resources, since MAP favors the preppers! Such an irony this happened under McKnight's watch!

Nope. Both (quant and nv) on coager are coachable. Verbal too. I think it even still had analogies, the most coachable of old sat sections. Raven matrices is definitely coachable. It's all ripe for test prep.

Please string together sentences with proper grammar, spelling, punctuation and the correct analogies for the corresponding exams, then someone might take you seriously. Honestly, you aren't even credible writing something like this. If nothing else, it's evidence that coaching doesn't work, or that at least you weren't the beneficiary of any.

Sorry a couple of abbreviations and 1 typo are too much for your reading comp abilities. Believe what you will. The evidence is in the return from coaching, which was good. You're right that I wasn't the beneficiary of coaching. I was the coach. I taught standardized test prep for a major company for years. I coached sat, gre, lsat and gmat (hope you can figure that out w/o the caps)! Great returns. Several sections of cogat were very similar to some sections on older gmat, sat and gre. Did a little digging on matrices and found that largely coachable too. Not to say the degree of improvement is the same, but coaching can be effective. It is not a magic genius test.

PS. Fragments aren't an issue in casual chat boards and non academic writing in general. (Just open a novel). Spelling doesn't string sentences together. Work on word choice here. Sorry about the typos. Terrible typist!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Both the Poolesville and Blair SMACs are HS choice Magnet programs. Both offer classes that are not offered in other HS curriculum (especially advanced math). Both are non-lottery applications. However, both no longer use a Nationally-recognized test to qualify applicants, since MAP is only an indicator of "grade-level" progress and the course offerings are somewhat static, so it's not really a G-T program per-se, although most G-T kids are "grade-level" advanced, so there is significant overlap.

A factor that some college admissions boards may take note of are the national school rankings. College admissions boards don't normally take the time to examine each HS individually, so will rely upon past performance of students they received as well as well-known national rankings as indicators of success. For the latter, US News is probably the most widely-known national school ranking system, however, GreatSchools, Niche, Patch, etc. all are roughly comparable.

When schools went virtual, the makers of the CogAT test would not allow it to be given online so MCPS had no choice but to cancel it that year. Afterward, they decided to extend that pause to 3 years so they can evaluate whether it was necessary. These days similar tests like SATs have fallen in disfavor with many colleges since they don't provide any new information aside from who took the expensive prep course to improve their scores.

*Shrug* I'm not the one trying to get into a good college, but if you think it's good for your kid(s), okay by me.

These tests don't really tell us anything we didn't already know but act as a gatekeeper for less affluent schools where kids don't typically take CogAT prep classes

And you think parents aren’t prepping for MAP now instead? Getting rid of COGAT a mistake.

Exactly! Also, studying/prepping for MAP is way easier than cogat, especially for the super rich.

Not really I mean learning a ton of math is harder than learning the test format. Also, my sense is the CogAT was more heavily weighted and mostly just kept out poor kids who were talented but didn't prep.

Other way around hun, but it's a good attempt to fool everyone.

Although the Verbal portion might somewhat favor kids who's parents speak English well or prep their kids, the Quantitative and Non-Verbal Battery were designed to help balance out kids who might not have access to tutoring and prep resources. That would be easy to determine by a CogAT screener (ex. a B profile, with verbal as the outlyer).

If anything, I think by dropping CogAT and adopting MAP, MCPS royally screwed kids with fewer access to resources, since MAP favors the preppers! Such an irony this happened under McKnight's watch!

Nope. Both (quant and nv) on coager are coachable. Verbal too. I think it even still had analogies, the most coachable of old sat sections. Raven matrices is definitely coachable. It's all ripe for test prep.

Please string together sentences with proper grammar, spelling, punctuation and the correct analogies for the corresponding exams, then someone might take you seriously. Honestly, you aren't even credible writing something like this. If nothing else, it's evidence that coaching doesn't work, or that at least you weren't the beneficiary of any.

Sorry a couple of abbreviations and 1 typo are too much for your reading comp abilities. Believe what you will. The evidence is in the return from coaching, which was good. You're right that I wasn't the beneficiary of coaching. I was the coach. I taught standardized test prep for a major company for years. I coached sat, gre, lsat and gmat (hope you can figure that out w/o the caps)! Great returns. Several sections of cogat were very similar to some sections on older gmat, sat and gre. Did a little digging on matrices and found that largely coachable too. Not to say the degree of improvement is the same, but coaching can be effective. It is not a magic genius test.

PS. Fragments aren't an issue in casual chat boards and non academic writing in general. (Just open a novel). Spelling doesn't string sentences together. Work on word choice here. Sorry about the typos. Terrible typist!

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