Reasons why one would not accept TJ offer?

[Anonymous]

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If the reports from DCUM are to be believed, not all of the kids with Algebra 2 are accepted as Freshman at TJ. I would assume the ones not accepted are from Carson, Longfellow, and Cooper. I would guess that the Algebra 2 kids from the schools that tend to send fewer kids, the ones without numbers reported, are more likely to have been accepted since those are likely in the top 1.5% of the pool and would be the most likely to apply from the less represented MS.

Why would you assume that? The top 1.5% is based on essays, GPA, and experience factors. There are no bonus points given for the kid's math level.

Are there any classes on how to improve your experience factors?

experience factors include race/ethnicity. No class can change it. Other experience factors can be changed by how parent spends their time and pocket money. Does parent want to spend $120 on basketball league, flashy shoes & trendy clothes, or on Kumon?

Even just spending $20k-$40k on prep at places like Curie will make a huge difference and spread out over several years. It's much cheaper than private.

Either a troll or insane. I'm betting on insane, but it could be a troll. Hard to know anymore.

I am ok with the fool saying Curie costs 5k, 10k, 15k, or 20k, when they are cheaper than Kumon. The fool is making sure Curie receives the publicity either by desire or by chance.

DP - but I will own up to being the person who was first in on the reporting with TJ students acknowledging that their Curie courses had shown them questions that ended up on the Quant-Q exam prior to them sitting for it.

I do not know if this program still exists, but when people talk about the $5K Curie course, what they're referring to is the flagship 16-month TJ Prep program that students would register for going into their 7th grade year. This was an immensely popular course that Curie offered that was buffered by students who had reported back specific questions from when they sat for the Quant-Q exam themselves, despite having signed an agreement not to do so. Curie offers many other less expensive courses, but this was the one that made the most impact with respect to TJ Admissions.

The access to exam questions gave Curie students an enormous leg up on the remainder of the TJ Admissions population and had a large part to play in the proportion of Asian students growing from 66% in the Class of 2022, to 72.3% in the Class of 2023, to 74.9% in the Class of 2024. During that same period, the number of students that Curie claimed as TJ admits went from 50 in 2022, to 95 in 2025, to a whopping 133 in 2024. Of further interest was the fact that Curie posted the first and last names of each of those students on their social media outlets, in the process betraying the fact that they virtually 100% of the students they served were of South Asian descent.

So, to summarize and to dispel some of the myths and nonsense going around on these fora:

1) Curie had a course that was explicitly designed to get kids into TJ;
2) This course included prep for the Quant-Q exam that included access to questions and question types that they should not have had;
3) The popularity of the course exploded over the 3 year period that the Quant-Q was used;
4) The course was listed at $5K to register;
5) Based on the lists they published, it appeared to be nearly exclusive to South Asian kids;
6) It had an enormous impact on TJ Admissions for especially the Classes of 2023 and 2024. In fact, simple data analysis indicated that approximately 70% of the 2024 students of South Asian descent were Curie customers and nearly 90% of the admits from Loudoun County were as well - based on how many of the students were listed as having been also admitted to either/both of AOS and AET.

Those are the facts. Importantly, the parents and students did not pay for access to the exam - what they paid for was access to a few of the questions that were a part of the question bank that each form of the Quant-Q exam draws from. Equally importantly, Curie did nothing illegal in this process - they merely accepted information that came to them from students who sat for the exam and broke a signed pledge to not discuss the exam with anyone.

Thank you for this creative story that never happened. You have been peddling this lie for years, and intentionally or foolishly driving this forum visitors towards Curie, increasing their business multifold after admission changes. You claim to be of South Asian descent, but what caused you to internalize racism, badmouth your own ethnic group, and feel ashamed of your own culture? Is it necessary to gain acceptance or approval from the group you desperately seek to associate with now? Specifically, what's your personal beef with Curie? Were you forced to attend Curie?

1) It's not a creative story. It's something that has been confirmed publicly by TJ students who were willing to identify themselves by name.
2) I don't really care whether or not it drives more traffic to Curie. What I care about is contextualizing the need for admissions reform, and I've done that very successfully.
3) I don't care about Curie. I care about TJ, and for too long I saw too many of the wrong kids getting admitted because of prep programs like Curie that brought in students who had to work so hard to keep up with TJ that they weren't able to add anything of value to the school environment. I saw kids seriously considering self-harm (and worse, some actually following through on it) because of the insane expectations of their parents and because they were dropped into a program that they couldn't handle - a phenomenon, by the way, that has largely disappeared under the new admissions process.
4) I am anonymous, so there isn't any societal benefit that I'm receiving from informing the public about what's actually going on. It's nothing more than the internal satisfaction from assisting in telling the full story.
5) It's a key feature of conservatives that they simply can't understand why someone would do something unless they have something to gain from it. I'm glad that's not an affliction I share.

The more you talk the more it appears you have a real deep seated hatred for Curie. From the timeline you describe above, at least for past five years you have been going to bed every night hating an enrichment business and its student community supposedly from a single ethnic group. Next few years there will be more students unknown to you who will be enrolling there, but your head is set to hate them all too. Do you understand the gravity of your mental issue?

1) Nope, no deep-seated hatred for them. The only real problem I have with them was their decision to publish the first and last names of all of the students who were admitted from their program, which unintentionally created issues for those kids once they got to TJ because they were branded as "Curie kids". I am betting that the permission for them to do so came from the parents and not from the students.
2) The entire Curie ordeal became apparent to me in late 2020, so more like three and a half years
3) Have never hated the kids at all. It's not their fault that so many of them were wedged into an environment at TJ that probably wasn't the best fit for them, and it's not their fault that other more deserving students were left out in the cold as a consequence. I'm bothered by the old admissions process that incentivized parents to put their children through that experience, but it doesn't exist anymore, thank goodness. And I'm bothered by the fact that several of the Curie kids probably could have done better in their college admissions process had they remained at their base school, and that some of the kids who the Curie kids replaced missed out on what TJ could have done for their college resumes because they were better fits.
4) As much as it may seem different to you, my knowledge and understanding about the Curie situation really doesn't take up too much of my time. It did when I was doing my original research back in August of 2020, but we were in the midst of the pandemic at that point, so it's not like I had much else to do

Your 5k, 10k, 20k, etc... claim about Curie cost versus others claiming it is cheaper than Kumon is puzzling for parents considering enrichment. With your years of research knowledge, can you do a true cost comparison of Curie versus Kumon as an alternative for 6th to 8th grade duration?

Kumon hasn't been confirmed to have had access to TJ Admissions exam questions, so I haven't done any research into them.

I am also not the poster who has made mentions of higher amounts than $5K for Curie courses. I have no idea what any of their other courses cost because as far as I know, they didn't include access to TJ exam questions.

What I do know is that Kumon appears to serve students who are not of South Asian descent - a claim which I'm not sure Curie can muster.

you are too busy obsessing over Curie. When was last time you been to a Kumon? A kumon center without Asian American students is just table and chairs with lights on. that's true with any low cost enrichment center in NoVa.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's amazing how often this poster brings up this Curie and TJ thing.

Ultimately though, even if this ridiculous fairytale were true, the admissions response was not to fix the testing process but instead remove testing almost entirely.

People also forget that there were two other tests, but those are gone as well.

The unnecessary reference to "conservatives" reveals what this is really about for them.

It is worth noting that initially, this was a necessity because under COVID-19 protocols at the time, it wasn't realistic to ask 3,000 applicants to sit for a proctored exam during the worst phase of infections and deaths. This would have had to happen in January or February of 2021 and there was no way it would have worked.

I actually would have been fine with maintaining some testing structure - the existence of the tests wasn't the problem, it was their use as a gatekeeping element. A student under the previous system could have scored in the 99th percentile on both the Quant-Q and the ACT Aspire Science, but if they scored in the 74th percentile on the Aspire Reading, they'd be ineligible to be semifinalists. That process was broken too.

There's nothing wrong with testing as long as it's used as a data point amongst many others in a holistic admissions process and cannot be used by outsiders as evidence of racism in the process. Unfortunately, that's precisely what happens when parents of students whose strongest metric is their exam scores claim that admissions officers are dinging their kids on personality scores because of race - when it's actually their personality.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Colleges care ONLY about GPA.

If you think your child cannot land in the top half of the TJ class AND get a 4.0 (w) or above GPA - then avoid TJ.

The overall curriculum at TJ is same as any base HS - they all cover mostly the same courses such as AP Stats, AP Cal A/B or B/C, AP Physics.

Well TJ has been forcefully transformed into being more of a base HS, while the original intent was for it have a much higher curriculum than that of base HS's.

As originally designed, TJ historically drew the attention of exceptional students because those students saw it as their only public school choice to get access to advanced curriculum that went beyond AP levels. These students were not coming to TJ to finish at AP level, but start there and progress further. For instance with math, an academically advanced TJ student historically expected to complete AP calculus BC in freshman/sophomore, MultiVariable & Linear in sophomore/junior, differential & discrete in junior/senior, and adv math techniques & scientific math in senior year. While these courses still exist currently, the enrollment in these courses is very low due to the caliber of admitted class. The middle schools in the past have supported and nurtured exceptional students by providing access to precalculus courses in the middle school itself, allowing them to go far beyond AP level if they chose TJ.

Over the past two decades, the rise of equity and diversity politics in FCPS and other feeder county schools has created roadblocks for these exceptional students in achieving precalculus or calculus by the end of middle school. The maximum access they now have is for Algebra 2 Trig, and even this requires numerous approvals and summer course enrollment. As a result, the pool of top talent entering TJ with trig and, at most, precalculus credits from middle school has been drastically reduced to less than a fifth of the new class. Currently, fewer than a hundred students in a TJ class enroll in courses beyond Multivariable/Linear.

When was this? (From you post, apparently this was 3-4 decades ago. As an FCPS alum myself, I'm not sure I can agree with you on this.)

FWIW, "equity and diversity politics" have only been around for the past 5 years or so. That is not why middle schools do not offer precal classes. (At TJ, 00 freshmen have completed trig/precal and go straight to calculus? Are they all from Loudoun County?)

If you're unaware of FCPS's history of racial quota-based admissions to TJ dating back to the mid-'90s, you were probably not yet born or likely in preschool. Many younger activists are manipulated into thinking they are starting this equity battle anew, to have you take ownership of it, and work for free. Politicians define the battle to their benefit. Activist is merely a pawn in their battle.

There is no such history since it's always been illegal. This is just misinformation spread by some bitter parents with an axe to grind.

"FCPS created a race-based affirmative action program to admit more black and Hispanic students. The program was in effect for the admissions process for the graduating classes of 1997 through 2002; the county ended it because of legal challenges to similar programs. Following the end of this program, the share of black and Hispanic students at the school decreased from 9.4 percent in 1997–98 to 3.5 percent in 2003–04."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_for_Science_and_Technology

No racial preference at all whatsoever...., until it gets exposed. Hopefully someone working there snitches and exposes the inside sham this time too. That drop from 9.4 to 3.5 percent is dramatic. Wonder how they explained it.

Affirmative action was an understood and accepted part of admissions processes ... until it wasn't. How old are you?

Old enough to have seen these racial deviltries over and over, even before you were born. Racial politics back then also hurt the very people it claimed to uplift, much like what you're seeing now with loading up the lower segment of TJ with innocent kids who cant handle 'the rigor and are forced to struggle and suffer with Cs, Ds, and Fs.

Not to mention: when other TJ students see the newer racially-preferences kids at school, they assume they are only there based on skin color, and they avoid group-projects with those kids.

Great job by the woke school board. /s

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Colleges care ONLY about GPA.

If you think your child cannot land in the top half of the TJ class AND get a 4.0 (w) or above GPA - then avoid TJ.

The overall curriculum at TJ is same as any base HS - they all cover mostly the same courses such as AP Stats, AP Cal A/B or B/C, AP Physics.

Well TJ has been forcefully transformed into being more of a base HS, while the original intent was for it have a much higher curriculum than that of base HS's.

As originally designed, TJ historically drew the attention of exceptional students because those students saw it as their only public school choice to get access to advanced curriculum that went beyond AP levels. These students were not coming to TJ to finish at AP level, but start there and progress further. For instance with math, an academically advanced TJ student historically expected to complete AP calculus BC in freshman/sophomore, MultiVariable & Linear in sophomore/junior, differential & discrete in junior/senior, and adv math techniques & scientific math in senior year. While these courses still exist currently, the enrollment in these courses is very low due to the caliber of admitted class. The middle schools in the past have supported and nurtured exceptional students by providing access to precalculus courses in the middle school itself, allowing them to go far beyond AP level if they chose TJ.

Over the past two decades, the rise of equity and diversity politics in FCPS and other feeder county schools has created roadblocks for these exceptional students in achieving precalculus or calculus by the end of middle school. The maximum access they now have is for Algebra 2 Trig, and even this requires numerous approvals and summer course enrollment. As a result, the pool of top talent entering TJ with trig and, at most, precalculus credits from middle school has been drastically reduced to less than a fifth of the new class. Currently, fewer than a hundred students in a TJ class enroll in courses beyond Multivariable/Linear.

When was this? (From you post, apparently this was 3-4 decades ago. As an FCPS alum myself, I'm not sure I can agree with you on this.)

FWIW, "equity and diversity politics" have only been around for the past 5 years or so. That is not why middle schools do not offer precal classes. (At TJ, 00 freshmen have completed trig/precal and go straight to calculus? Are they all from Loudoun County?)

If you're unaware of FCPS's history of racial quota-based admissions to TJ dating back to the mid-'90s, you were probably not yet born or likely in preschool. Many younger activists are manipulated into thinking they are starting this equity battle anew, to have you take ownership of it, and work for free. Politicians define the battle to their benefit. Activist is merely a pawn in their battle.

There is no such history since it's always been illegal. This is just misinformation spread by some bitter parents with an axe to grind.

"FCPS created a race-based affirmative action program to admit more black and Hispanic students. The program was in effect for the admissions process for the graduating classes of 1997 through 2002; the county ended it because of legal challenges to similar programs. Following the end of this program, the share of black and Hispanic students at the school decreased from 9.4 percent in 1997–98 to 3.5 percent in 2003–04."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_for_Science_and_Technology

No racial preference at all whatsoever...., until it gets exposed. Hopefully someone working there snitches and exposes the inside sham this time too. That drop from 9.4 to 3.5 percent is dramatic. Wonder how they explained it.

Affirmative action was an understood and accepted part of admissions processes ... until it wasn't. How old are you?

Old enough to have seen these racial deviltries over and over, even before you were born. Racial politics back then also hurt the very people it claimed to uplift, much like what you're seeing now with loading up the lower segment of TJ with innocent kids who cant handle 'the rigor and are forced to struggle and suffer with Cs, Ds, and Fs.

Not to mention: when other TJ students see the newer racially-preferences kids at school, they assume they are only there based on skin color, and they avoid group-projects with those kids.

Great job by the woke school board. /s

Wow.
I doubt many TJ kids are actually that racist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Colleges care ONLY about GPA.

If you think your child cannot land in the top half of the TJ class AND get a 4.0 (w) or above GPA - then avoid TJ.

The overall curriculum at TJ is same as any base HS - they all cover mostly the same courses such as AP Stats, AP Cal A/B or B/C, AP Physics.

Well TJ has been forcefully transformed into being more of a base HS, while the original intent was for it have a much higher curriculum than that of base HS's.

As originally designed, TJ historically drew the attention of exceptional students because those students saw it as their only public school choice to get access to advanced curriculum that went beyond AP levels. These students were not coming to TJ to finish at AP level, but start there and progress further. For instance with math, an academically advanced TJ student historically expected to complete AP calculus BC in freshman/sophomore, MultiVariable & Linear in sophomore/junior, differential & discrete in junior/senior, and adv math techniques & scientific math in senior year. While these courses still exist currently, the enrollment in these courses is very low due to the caliber of admitted class. The middle schools in the past have supported and nurtured exceptional students by providing access to precalculus courses in the middle school itself, allowing them to go far beyond AP level if they chose TJ.

Over the past two decades, the rise of equity and diversity politics in FCPS and other feeder county schools has created roadblocks for these exceptional students in achieving precalculus or calculus by the end of middle school. The maximum access they now have is for Algebra 2 Trig, and even this requires numerous approvals and summer course enrollment. As a result, the pool of top talent entering TJ with trig and, at most, precalculus credits from middle school has been drastically reduced to less than a fifth of the new class. Currently, fewer than a hundred students in a TJ class enroll in courses beyond Multivariable/Linear.

When was this? (From you post, apparently this was 3-4 decades ago. As an FCPS alum myself, I'm not sure I can agree with you on this.)

FWIW, "equity and diversity politics" have only been around for the past 5 years or so. That is not why middle schools do not offer precal classes. (At TJ, 00 freshmen have completed trig/precal and go straight to calculus? Are they all from Loudoun County?)

If you're unaware of FCPS's history of racial quota-based admissions to TJ dating back to the mid-'90s, you were probably not yet born or likely in preschool. Many younger activists are manipulated into thinking they are starting this equity battle anew, to have you take ownership of it, and work for free. Politicians define the battle to their benefit. Activist is merely a pawn in their battle.

There is no such history since it's always been illegal. This is just misinformation spread by some bitter parents with an axe to grind.

"FCPS created a race-based affirmative action program to admit more black and Hispanic students. The program was in effect for the admissions process for the graduating classes of 1997 through 2002; the county ended it because of legal challenges to similar programs. Following the end of this program, the share of black and Hispanic students at the school decreased from 9.4 percent in 1997–98 to 3.5 percent in 2003–04."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_for_Science_and_Technology

No racial preference at all whatsoever...., until it gets exposed. Hopefully someone working there snitches and exposes the inside sham this time too. That drop from 9.4 to 3.5 percent is dramatic. Wonder how they explained it.

Affirmative action was an understood and accepted part of admissions processes ... until it wasn't. How old are you?

Old enough to have seen these racial deviltries over and over, even before you were born. Racial politics back then also hurt the very people it claimed to uplift, much like what you're seeing now with loading up the lower segment of TJ with innocent kids who cant handle 'the rigor and are forced to struggle and suffer with Cs, Ds, and Fs.

Not to mention: when other TJ students see the newer racially-preferences kids at school, they assume they are only there based on skin color, and they avoid group-projects with those kids.

Great job by the woke school board. /s

group projects that dont require math or science go just fine, like art cultural club related. Other than initial iBet project, the algebra 1 students prefer to form a group with their classmates, dont get to see or collaborate with math4/5 students as they are in a different class altogether. The way the admissions are being done with different talent levels, there arent many opportunities for mixed talents to collaborate together on academic projects.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
If the reports from DCUM are to be believed, not all of the kids with Algebra 2 are accepted as Freshman at TJ. I would assume the ones not accepted are from Carson, Longfellow, and Cooper. I would guess that the Algebra 2 kids from the schools that tend to send fewer kids, the ones without numbers reported, are more likely to have been accepted since those are likely in the top 1.5% of the pool and would be the most likely to apply from the less represented MS.

Why would you assume that? The top 1.5% is based on essays, GPA, and experience factors. There are no bonus points given for the kid's math level.

Are there any classes on how to improve your experience factors?

experience factors include race/ethnicity. No class can change it. Other experience factors can be changed by how parent spends their time and pocket money. Does parent want to spend $120 on basketball league, flashy shoes & trendy clothes, or on Kumon?

Even just spending $20k-$40k on prep at places like Curie will make a huge difference and spread out over several years. It's much cheaper than private.

Either a troll or insane. I'm betting on insane, but it could be a troll. Hard to know anymore.

I am ok with the fool saying Curie costs 5k, 10k, 15k, or 20k, when they are cheaper than Kumon. The fool is making sure Curie receives the publicity either by desire or by chance.

DP - but I will own up to being the person who was first in on the reporting with TJ students acknowledging that their Curie courses had shown them questions that ended up on the Quant-Q exam prior to them sitting for it.

I do not know if this program still exists, but when people talk about the $5K Curie course, what they're referring to is the flagship 16-month TJ Prep program that students would register for going into their 7th grade year. This was an immensely popular course that Curie offered that was buffered by students who had reported back specific questions from when they sat for the Quant-Q exam themselves, despite having signed an agreement not to do so. Curie offers many other less expensive courses, but this was the one that made the most impact with respect to TJ Admissions.

The access to exam questions gave Curie students an enormous leg up on the remainder of the TJ Admissions population and had a large part to play in the proportion of Asian students growing from 66% in the Class of 2022, to 72.3% in the Class of 2023, to 74.9% in the Class of 2024. During that same period, the number of students that Curie claimed as TJ admits went from 50 in 2022, to 95 in 2025, to a whopping 133 in 2024. Of further interest was the fact that Curie posted the first and last names of each of those students on their social media outlets, in the process betraying the fact that they virtually 100% of the students they served were of South Asian descent.

So, to summarize and to dispel some of the myths and nonsense going around on these fora:

1) Curie had a course that was explicitly designed to get kids into TJ;
2) This course included prep for the Quant-Q exam that included access to questions and question types that they should not have had;
3) The popularity of the course exploded over the 3 year period that the Quant-Q was used;
4) The course was listed at $5K to register;
5) Based on the lists they published, it appeared to be nearly exclusive to South Asian kids;
6) It had an enormous impact on TJ Admissions for especially the Classes of 2023 and 2024. In fact, simple data analysis indicated that approximately 70% of the 2024 students of South Asian descent were Curie customers and nearly 90% of the admits from Loudoun County were as well - based on how many of the students were listed as having been also admitted to either/both of AOS and AET.

Those are the facts. Importantly, the parents and students did not pay for access to the exam - what they paid for was access to a few of the questions that were a part of the question bank that each form of the Quant-Q exam draws from. Equally importantly, Curie did nothing illegal in this process - they merely accepted information that came to them from students who sat for the exam and broke a signed pledge to not discuss the exam with anyone.

Thank you for this creative story that never happened. You have been peddling this lie for years, and intentionally or foolishly driving this forum visitors towards Curie, increasing their business multifold after admission changes. You claim to be of South Asian descent, but what caused you to internalize racism, badmouth your own ethnic group, and feel ashamed of your own culture? Is it necessary to gain acceptance or approval from the group you desperately seek to associate with now? Specifically, what's your personal beef with Curie? Were you forced to attend Curie?

1) It's not a creative story. It's something that has been confirmed publicly by TJ students who were willing to identify themselves by name.
2) I don't really care whether or not it drives more traffic to Curie. What I care about is contextualizing the need for admissions reform, and I've done that very successfully.
3) I don't care about Curie. I care about TJ, and for too long I saw too many of the wrong kids getting admitted because of prep programs like Curie that brought in students who had to work so hard to keep up with TJ that they weren't able to add anything of value to the school environment. I saw kids seriously considering self-harm (and worse, some actually following through on it) because of the insane expectations of their parents and because they were dropped into a program that they couldn't handle - a phenomenon, by the way, that has largely disappeared under the new admissions process.
4) I am anonymous, so there isn't any societal benefit that I'm receiving from informing the public about what's actually going on. It's nothing more than the internal satisfaction from assisting in telling the full story.
5) It's a key feature of conservatives that they simply can't understand why someone would do something unless they have something to gain from it. I'm glad that's not an affliction I share.

The more you talk the more it appears you have a real deep seated hatred for Curie. From the timeline you describe above, at least for past five years you have been going to bed every night hating an enrichment business and its student community supposedly from a single ethnic group. Next few years there will be more students unknown to you who will be enrolling there, but your head is set to hate them all too. Do you understand the gravity of your mental issue?

1) Nope, no deep-seated hatred for them. The only real problem I have with them was their decision to publish the first and last names of all of the students who were admitted from their program, which unintentionally created issues for those kids once they got to TJ because they were branded as "Curie kids". I am betting that the permission for them to do so came from the parents and not from the students.
2) The entire Curie ordeal became apparent to me in late 2020, so more like three and a half years
3) Have never hated the kids at all. It's not their fault that so many of them were wedged into an environment at TJ that probably wasn't the best fit for them, and it's not their fault that other more deserving students were left out in the cold as a consequence. I'm bothered by the old admissions process that incentivized parents to put their children through that experience, but it doesn't exist anymore, thank goodness. And I'm bothered by the fact that several of the Curie kids probably could have done better in their college admissions process had they remained at their base school, and that some of the kids who the Curie kids replaced missed out on what TJ could have done for their college resumes because they were better fits.
4) As much as it may seem different to you, my knowledge and understanding about the Curie situation really doesn't take up too much of my time. It did when I was doing my original research back in August of 2020, but we were in the midst of the pandemic at that point, so it's not like I had much else to do

Your 5k, 10k, 20k, etc... claim about Curie cost versus others claiming it is cheaper than Kumon is puzzling for parents considering enrichment. With your years of research knowledge, can you do a true cost comparison of Curie versus Kumon as an alternative for 6th to 8th grade duration?

Kumon hasn't been confirmed to have had access to TJ Admissions exam questions, so I haven't done any research into them.

I am also not the poster who has made mentions of higher amounts than $5K for Curie courses. I have no idea what any of their other courses cost because as far as I know, they didn't include access to TJ exam questions.

What I do know is that Kumon appears to serve students who are not of South Asian descent - a claim which I'm not sure Curie can muster.

you are too busy obsessing over Curie. When was last time you been to a Kumon? A kumon center without Asian American students is just table and chairs with lights on. that's true with any low cost enrichment center in NoVa.

Perhaps that's true, but there's a big difference between "Asian American" and "South Asian". There are also a couple of enrichment centers right near where I live and there isn't any sort of obvious racial/ethnic tilt that I can see.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Colleges care ONLY about GPA.

If you think your child cannot land in the top half of the TJ class AND get a 4.0 (w) or above GPA - then avoid TJ.

The overall curriculum at TJ is same as any base HS - they all cover mostly the same courses such as AP Stats, AP Cal A/B or B/C, AP Physics.

Well TJ has been forcefully transformed into being more of a base HS, while the original intent was for it have a much higher curriculum than that of base HS's.

As originally designed, TJ historically drew the attention of exceptional students because those students saw it as their only public school choice to get access to advanced curriculum that went beyond AP levels. These students were not coming to TJ to finish at AP level, but start there and progress further. For instance with math, an academically advanced TJ student historically expected to complete AP calculus BC in freshman/sophomore, MultiVariable & Linear in sophomore/junior, differential & discrete in junior/senior, and adv math techniques & scientific math in senior year. While these courses still exist currently, the enrollment in these courses is very low due to the caliber of admitted class. The middle schools in the past have supported and nurtured exceptional students by providing access to precalculus courses in the middle school itself, allowing them to go far beyond AP level if they chose TJ.

Over the past two decades, the rise of equity and diversity politics in FCPS and other feeder county schools has created roadblocks for these exceptional students in achieving precalculus or calculus by the end of middle school. The maximum access they now have is for Algebra 2 Trig, and even this requires numerous approvals and summer course enrollment. As a result, the pool of top talent entering TJ with trig and, at most, precalculus credits from middle school has been drastically reduced to less than a fifth of the new class. Currently, fewer than a hundred students in a TJ class enroll in courses beyond Multivariable/Linear.

When was this? (From you post, apparently this was 3-4 decades ago. As an FCPS alum myself, I'm not sure I can agree with you on this.)

FWIW, "equity and diversity politics" have only been around for the past 5 years or so. That is not why middle schools do not offer precal classes. (At TJ, 00 freshmen have completed trig/precal and go straight to calculus? Are they all from Loudoun County?)

If you're unaware of FCPS's history of racial quota-based admissions to TJ dating back to the mid-'90s, you were probably not yet born or likely in preschool. Many younger activists are manipulated into thinking they are starting this equity battle anew, to have you take ownership of it, and work for free. Politicians define the battle to their benefit. Activist is merely a pawn in their battle.

There is no such history since it's always been illegal. This is just misinformation spread by some bitter parents with an axe to grind.

"FCPS created a race-based affirmative action program to admit more black and Hispanic students. The program was in effect for the admissions process for the graduating classes of 1997 through 2002; the county ended it because of legal challenges to similar programs. Following the end of this program, the share of black and Hispanic students at the school decreased from 9.4 percent in 1997–98 to 3.5 percent in 2003–04."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_for_Science_and_Technology

No racial preference at all whatsoever...., until it gets exposed. Hopefully someone working there snitches and exposes the inside sham this time too. That drop from 9.4 to 3.5 percent is dramatic. Wonder how they explained it.

Affirmative action was an understood and accepted part of admissions processes ... until it wasn't. How old are you?

Old enough to have seen these racial deviltries over and over, even before you were born. Racial politics back then also hurt the very people it claimed to uplift, much like what you're seeing now with loading up the lower segment of TJ with innocent kids who cant handle 'the rigor and are forced to struggle and suffer with Cs, Ds, and Fs.

Not to mention: when other TJ students see the newer racially-preferences kids at school, they assume they are only there based on skin color, and they avoid group-projects with those kids.

Great job by the woke school board. /s

Wow.
I doubt many TJ kids are actually that racist.

DP. The kids by and large are not, but the parents certainly can be.

[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:
If the reports from DCUM are to be believed, not all of the kids with Algebra 2 are accepted as Freshman at TJ. I would assume the ones not accepted are from Carson, Longfellow, and Cooper. I would guess that the Algebra 2 kids from the schools that tend to send fewer kids, the ones without numbers reported, are more likely to have been accepted since those are likely in the top 1.5% of the pool and would be the most likely to apply from the less represented MS.

Why would you assume that? The top 1.5% is based on essays, GPA, and experience factors. There are no bonus points given for the kid's math level.

Are there any classes on how to improve your experience factors?

experience factors include race/ethnicity. No class can change it. Other experience factors can be changed by how parent spends their time and pocket money. Does parent want to spend $120 on basketball league, flashy shoes & trendy clothes, or on Kumon?

Even just spending $20k-$40k on prep at places like Curie will make a huge difference and spread out over several years. It's much cheaper than private.

Either a troll or insane. I'm betting on insane, but it could be a troll. Hard to know anymore.

I am ok with the fool saying Curie costs 5k, 10k, 15k, or 20k, when they are cheaper than Kumon. The fool is making sure Curie receives the publicity either by desire or by chance.

DP - but I will own up to being the person who was first in on the reporting with TJ students acknowledging that their Curie courses had shown them questions that ended up on the Quant-Q exam prior to them sitting for it.

I do not know if this program still exists, but when people talk about the $5K Curie course, what they're referring to is the flagship 16-month TJ Prep program that students would register for going into their 7th grade year. This was an immensely popular course that Curie offered that was buffered by students who had reported back specific questions from when they sat for the Quant-Q exam themselves, despite having signed an agreement not to do so. Curie offers many other less expensive courses, but this was the one that made the most impact with respect to TJ Admissions.

The access to exam questions gave Curie students an enormous leg up on the remainder of the TJ Admissions population and had a large part to play in the proportion of Asian students growing from 66% in the Class of 2022, to 72.3% in the Class of 2023, to 74.9% in the Class of 2024. During that same period, the number of students that Curie claimed as TJ admits went from 50 in 2022, to 95 in 2025, to a whopping 133 in 2024. Of further interest was the fact that Curie posted the first and last names of each of those students on their social media outlets, in the process betraying the fact that they virtually 100% of the students they served were of South Asian descent.

So, to summarize and to dispel some of the myths and nonsense going around on these fora:

1) Curie had a course that was explicitly designed to get kids into TJ;
2) This course included prep for the Quant-Q exam that included access to questions and question types that they should not have had;
3) The popularity of the course exploded over the 3 year period that the Quant-Q was used;
4) The course was listed at $5K to register;
5) Based on the lists they published, it appeared to be nearly exclusive to South Asian kids;
6) It had an enormous impact on TJ Admissions for especially the Classes of 2023 and 2024. In fact, simple data analysis indicated that approximately 70% of the 2024 students of South Asian descent were Curie customers and nearly 90% of the admits from Loudoun County were as well - based on how many of the students were listed as having been also admitted to either/both of AOS and AET.

Those are the facts. Importantly, the parents and students did not pay for access to the exam - what they paid for was access to a few of the questions that were a part of the question bank that each form of the Quant-Q exam draws from. Equally importantly, Curie did nothing illegal in this process - they merely accepted information that came to them from students who sat for the exam and broke a signed pledge to not discuss the exam with anyone.

Thank you for this creative story that never happened. You have been peddling this lie for years, and intentionally or foolishly driving this forum visitors towards Curie, increasing their business multifold after admission changes. You claim to be of South Asian descent, but what caused you to internalize racism, badmouth your own ethnic group, and feel ashamed of your own culture? Is it necessary to gain acceptance or approval from the group you desperately seek to associate with now? Specifically, what's your personal beef with Curie? Were you forced to attend Curie?

1) It's not a creative story. It's something that has been confirmed publicly by TJ students who were willing to identify themselves by name.
2) I don't really care whether or not it drives more traffic to Curie. What I care about is contextualizing the need for admissions reform, and I've done that very successfully.
3) I don't care about Curie. I care about TJ, and for too long I saw too many of the wrong kids getting admitted because of prep programs like Curie that brought in students who had to work so hard to keep up with TJ that they weren't able to add anything of value to the school environment. I saw kids seriously considering self-harm (and worse, some actually following through on it) because of the insane expectations of their parents and because they were dropped into a program that they couldn't handle - a phenomenon, by the way, that has largely disappeared under the new admissions process.
4) I am anonymous, so there isn't any societal benefit that I'm receiving from informing the public about what's actually going on. It's nothing more than the internal satisfaction from assisting in telling the full story.
5) It's a key feature of conservatives that they simply can't understand why someone would do something unless they have something to gain from it. I'm glad that's not an affliction I share.

The more you talk the more it appears you have a real deep seated hatred for Curie. From the timeline you describe above, at least for past five years you have been going to bed every night hating an enrichment business and its student community supposedly from a single ethnic group. Next few years there will be more students unknown to you who will be enrolling there, but your head is set to hate them all too. Do you understand the gravity of your mental issue?

1) Nope, no deep-seated hatred for them. The only real problem I have with them was their decision to publish the first and last names of all of the students who were admitted from their program, which unintentionally created issues for those kids once they got to TJ because they were branded as "Curie kids". I am betting that the permission for them to do so came from the parents and not from the students.
2) The entire Curie ordeal became apparent to me in late 2020, so more like three and a half years
3) Have never hated the kids at all. It's not their fault that so many of them were wedged into an environment at TJ that probably wasn't the best fit for them, and it's not their fault that other more deserving students were left out in the cold as a consequence. I'm bothered by the old admissions process that incentivized parents to put their children through that experience, but it doesn't exist anymore, thank goodness. And I'm bothered by the fact that several of the Curie kids probably could have done better in their college admissions process had they remained at their base school, and that some of the kids who the Curie kids replaced missed out on what TJ could have done for their college resumes because they were better fits.
4) As much as it may seem different to you, my knowledge and understanding about the Curie situation really doesn't take up too much of my time. It did when I was doing my original research back in August of 2020, but we were in the midst of the pandemic at that point, so it's not like I had much else to do

Your 5k, 10k, 20k, etc... claim about Curie cost versus others claiming it is cheaper than Kumon is puzzling for parents considering enrichment. With your years of research knowledge, can you do a true cost comparison of Curie versus Kumon as an alternative for 6th to 8th grade duration?

Kumon hasn't been confirmed to have had access to TJ Admissions exam questions, so I haven't done any research into them.

I am also not the poster who has made mentions of higher amounts than $5K for Curie courses. I have no idea what any of their other courses cost because as far as I know, they didn't include access to TJ exam questions.

What I do know is that Kumon appears to serve students who are not of South Asian descent - a claim which I'm not sure Curie can muster.

you are too busy obsessing over Curie. When was last time you been to a Kumon? A kumon center without Asian American students is just table and chairs with lights on. that's true with any low cost enrichment center in NoVa.

Perhaps that's true, but there's a big difference between "Asian American" and "South Asian". There are also a couple of enrichment centers right near where I live and there isn't any sort of obvious racial/ethnic tilt that I can see.

it appears your mental issue is microscopically creepier how are the two different?

[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:
If the reports from DCUM are to be believed, not all of the kids with Algebra 2 are accepted as Freshman at TJ. I would assume the ones not accepted are from Carson, Longfellow, and Cooper. I would guess that the Algebra 2 kids from the schools that tend to send fewer kids, the ones without numbers reported, are more likely to have been accepted since those are likely in the top 1.5% of the pool and would be the most likely to apply from the less represented MS.

Why would you assume that? The top 1.5% is based on essays, GPA, and experience factors. There are no bonus points given for the kid's math level.

Are there any classes on how to improve your experience factors?

experience factors include race/ethnicity. No class can change it. Other experience factors can be changed by how parent spends their time and pocket money. Does parent want to spend $120 on basketball league, flashy shoes & trendy clothes, or on Kumon?

Even just spending $20k-$40k on prep at places like Curie will make a huge difference and spread out over several years. It's much cheaper than private.

Either a troll or insane. I'm betting on insane, but it could be a troll. Hard to know anymore.

I am ok with the fool saying Curie costs 5k, 10k, 15k, or 20k, when they are cheaper than Kumon. The fool is making sure Curie receives the publicity either by desire or by chance.

DP - but I will own up to being the person who was first in on the reporting with TJ students acknowledging that their Curie courses had shown them questions that ended up on the Quant-Q exam prior to them sitting for it.

I do not know if this program still exists, but when people talk about the $5K Curie course, what they're referring to is the flagship 16-month TJ Prep program that students would register for going into their 7th grade year. This was an immensely popular course that Curie offered that was buffered by students who had reported back specific questions from when they sat for the Quant-Q exam themselves, despite having signed an agreement not to do so. Curie offers many other less expensive courses, but this was the one that made the most impact with respect to TJ Admissions.

The access to exam questions gave Curie students an enormous leg up on the remainder of the TJ Admissions population and had a large part to play in the proportion of Asian students growing from 66% in the Class of 2022, to 72.3% in the Class of 2023, to 74.9% in the Class of 2024. During that same period, the number of students that Curie claimed as TJ admits went from 50 in 2022, to 95 in 2025, to a whopping 133 in 2024. Of further interest was the fact that Curie posted the first and last names of each of those students on their social media outlets, in the process betraying the fact that they virtually 100% of the students they served were of South Asian descent.

So, to summarize and to dispel some of the myths and nonsense going around on these fora:

1) Curie had a course that was explicitly designed to get kids into TJ;
2) This course included prep for the Quant-Q exam that included access to questions and question types that they should not have had;
3) The popularity of the course exploded over the 3 year period that the Quant-Q was used;
4) The course was listed at $5K to register;
5) Based on the lists they published, it appeared to be nearly exclusive to South Asian kids;
6) It had an enormous impact on TJ Admissions for especially the Classes of 2023 and 2024. In fact, simple data analysis indicated that approximately 70% of the 2024 students of South Asian descent were Curie customers and nearly 90% of the admits from Loudoun County were as well - based on how many of the students were listed as having been also admitted to either/both of AOS and AET.

Those are the facts. Importantly, the parents and students did not pay for access to the exam - what they paid for was access to a few of the questions that were a part of the question bank that each form of the Quant-Q exam draws from. Equally importantly, Curie did nothing illegal in this process - they merely accepted information that came to them from students who sat for the exam and broke a signed pledge to not discuss the exam with anyone.

Thank you for this creative story that never happened. You have been peddling this lie for years, and intentionally or foolishly driving this forum visitors towards Curie, increasing their business multifold after admission changes. You claim to be of South Asian descent, but what caused you to internalize racism, badmouth your own ethnic group, and feel ashamed of your own culture? Is it necessary to gain acceptance or approval from the group you desperately seek to associate with now? Specifically, what's your personal beef with Curie? Were you forced to attend Curie?

1) It's not a creative story. It's something that has been confirmed publicly by TJ students who were willing to identify themselves by name.
2) I don't really care whether or not it drives more traffic to Curie. What I care about is contextualizing the need for admissions reform, and I've done that very successfully.
3) I don't care about Curie. I care about TJ, and for too long I saw too many of the wrong kids getting admitted because of prep programs like Curie that brought in students who had to work so hard to keep up with TJ that they weren't able to add anything of value to the school environment. I saw kids seriously considering self-harm (and worse, some actually following through on it) because of the insane expectations of their parents and because they were dropped into a program that they couldn't handle - a phenomenon, by the way, that has largely disappeared under the new admissions process.
4) I am anonymous, so there isn't any societal benefit that I'm receiving from informing the public about what's actually going on. It's nothing more than the internal satisfaction from assisting in telling the full story.
5) It's a key feature of conservatives that they simply can't understand why someone would do something unless they have something to gain from it. I'm glad that's not an affliction I share.

The more you talk the more it appears you have a real deep seated hatred for Curie. From the timeline you describe above, at least for past five years you have been going to bed every night hating an enrichment business and its student community supposedly from a single ethnic group. Next few years there will be more students unknown to you who will be enrolling there, but your head is set to hate them all too. Do you understand the gravity of your mental issue?

1) Nope, no deep-seated hatred for them. The only real problem I have with them was their decision to publish the first and last names of all of the students who were admitted from their program, which unintentionally created issues for those kids once they got to TJ because they were branded as "Curie kids". I am betting that the permission for them to do so came from the parents and not from the students.
2) The entire Curie ordeal became apparent to me in late 2020, so more like three and a half years
3) Have never hated the kids at all. It's not their fault that so many of them were wedged into an environment at TJ that probably wasn't the best fit for them, and it's not their fault that other more deserving students were left out in the cold as a consequence. I'm bothered by the old admissions process that incentivized parents to put their children through that experience, but it doesn't exist anymore, thank goodness. And I'm bothered by the fact that several of the Curie kids probably could have done better in their college admissions process had they remained at their base school, and that some of the kids who the Curie kids replaced missed out on what TJ could have done for their college resumes because they were better fits.
4) As much as it may seem different to you, my knowledge and understanding about the Curie situation really doesn't take up too much of my time. It did when I was doing my original research back in August of 2020, but we were in the midst of the pandemic at that point, so it's not like I had much else to do

Your 5k, 10k, 20k, etc... claim about Curie cost versus others claiming it is cheaper than Kumon is puzzling for parents considering enrichment. With your years of research knowledge, can you do a true cost comparison of Curie versus Kumon as an alternative for 6th to 8th grade duration?

Kumon hasn't been confirmed to have had access to TJ Admissions exam questions, so I haven't done any research into them.

I am also not the poster who has made mentions of higher amounts than $5K for Curie courses. I have no idea what any of their other courses cost because as far as I know, they didn't include access to TJ exam questions.

What I do know is that Kumon appears to serve students who are not of South Asian descent - a claim which I'm not sure Curie can muster.

you are too busy obsessing over Curie. When was last time you been to a Kumon? A kumon center without Asian American students is just table and chairs with lights on. that's true with any low cost enrichment center in NoVa.

Perhaps that's true, but there's a big difference between "Asian American" and "South Asian". There are also a couple of enrichment centers right near where I live and there isn't any sort of obvious racial/ethnic tilt that I can see.

it appears your mental issue is microscopically creepier how are the two different?

You're kidding, right? "South Asian" encompasses essentially those of Indian, Sri Lankan, and perhaps Bangladeshi descent, while "Asian American" would add those of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Middle Eastern descent.

Curie only serves the former. Which is pretty gross, when you get right down to it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's amazing how often this poster brings up this Curie and TJ thing.

Ultimately though, even if this ridiculous fairytale were true, the admissions response was not to fix the testing process but instead remove testing almost entirely.

People also forget that there were two other tests, but those are gone as well.

The unnecessary reference to "conservatives" reveals what this is really about for them.

It is worth noting that initially, this was a necessity because under COVID-19 protocols at the time, it wasn't realistic to ask 3,000 applicants to sit for a proctored exam during the worst phase of infections and deaths. This would have had to happen in January or February of 2021 and there was no way it would have worked.

I actually would have been fine with maintaining some testing structure - the existence of the tests wasn't the problem, it was their use as a gatekeeping element. A student under the previous system could have scored in the 99th percentile on both the Quant-Q and the ACT Aspire Science, but if they scored in the 74th percentile on the Aspire Reading, they'd be ineligible to be semifinalists. That process was broken too.

There's nothing wrong with testing as long as it's used as a data point amongst many others in a holistic admissions process and cannot be used by outsiders as evidence of racism in the process. Unfortunately, that's precisely what happens when parents of students whose strongest metric is their exam scores claim that admissions officers are dinging their kids on personality scores because of race - when it's actually their personality.

But they threw out testing. Fine. Now no one can leverage that advantage. But then they punished kids for what their parents do for a living, so instead of equalizing the advantage they just shifted it to another group of kids.

And even further, the lack of differentiation of curriculum in middle school, maybe norm’s for each county, also punished kids who take more rigorous workloads.

They didn’t even consider base schools when assigning their 1.5% to AAP centers.

They achieved their goal. But the results coming in also confirm the critics concern.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's amazing how often this poster brings up this Curie and TJ thing.

Ultimately though, even if this ridiculous fairytale were true, the admissions response was not to fix the testing process but instead remove testing almost entirely.

People also forget that there were two other tests, but those are gone as well.

The unnecessary reference to "conservatives" reveals what this is really about for them.

It is worth noting that initially, this was a necessity because under COVID-19 protocols at the time, it wasn't realistic to ask 3,000 applicants to sit for a proctored exam during the worst phase of infections and deaths. This would have had to happen in January or February of 2021 and there was no way it would have worked.

I actually would have been fine with maintaining some testing structure - the existence of the tests wasn't the problem, it was their use as a gatekeeping element. A student under the previous system could have scored in the 99th percentile on both the Quant-Q and the ACT Aspire Science, but if they scored in the 74th percentile on the Aspire Reading, they'd be ineligible to be semifinalists. That process was broken too.

There's nothing wrong with testing as long as it's used as a data point amongst many others in a holistic admissions process and cannot be used by outsiders as evidence of racism in the process. Unfortunately, that's precisely what happens when parents of students whose strongest metric is their exam scores claim that admissions officers are dinging their kids on personality scores because of race - when it's actually their personality.

But they threw out testing. Fine. Now no one can leverage that advantage. But then they punished kids for what their parents do for a living, so instead of equalizing the advantage they just shifted it to another group of kids.

And even further, the lack of differentiation of curriculum in middle school, maybe norm’s for each county, also punished kids who take more rigorous workloads.

They didn’t even consider base schools when assigning their 1.5% to AAP centers.

They achieved their goal. But the results coming in also confirm the critics concern.

DP. No students were punished for what happened. Nor were students punished who want to go to TJ, no matter how much you complain on their behalf.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's amazing how often this poster brings up this Curie and TJ thing.

Ultimately though, even if this ridiculous fairytale were true, the admissions response was not to fix the testing process but instead remove testing almost entirely.

People also forget that there were two other tests, but those are gone as well.

The unnecessary reference to "conservatives" reveals what this is really about for them.

It is worth noting that initially, this was a necessity because under COVID-19 protocols at the time, it wasn't realistic to ask 3,000 applicants to sit for a proctored exam during the worst phase of infections and deaths. This would have had to happen in January or February of 2021 and there was no way it would have worked.

I actually would have been fine with maintaining some testing structure - the existence of the tests wasn't the problem, it was their use as a gatekeeping element. A student under the previous system could have scored in the 99th percentile on both the Quant-Q and the ACT Aspire Science, but if they scored in the 74th percentile on the Aspire Reading, they'd be ineligible to be semifinalists. That process was broken too.

There's nothing wrong with testing as long as it's used as a data point amongst many others in a holistic admissions process and cannot be used by outsiders as evidence of racism in the process. Unfortunately, that's precisely what happens when parents of students whose strongest metric is their exam scores claim that admissions officers are dinging their kids on personality scores because of race - when it's actually their personality.

But they threw out testing. Fine. Now no one can leverage that advantage. But then they punished kids for what their parents do for a living, so instead of equalizing the advantage they just shifted it to another group of kids.

And even further, the lack of differentiation of curriculum in middle school, maybe norm’s for each county, also punished kids who take more rigorous workloads.

They didn’t even consider base schools when assigning their 1.5% to AAP centers.

They achieved their goal. But the results coming in also confirm the critics concern.

DP. No students were punished for what happened. Nor were students punished who want to go to TJ, no matter how much you complain on their behalf.

Yeah penalized in the admissions process is more accurate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's amazing how often this poster brings up this Curie and TJ thing.

Ultimately though, even if this ridiculous fairytale were true, the admissions response was not to fix the testing process but instead remove testing almost entirely.

People also forget that there were two other tests, but those are gone as well.

The unnecessary reference to "conservatives" reveals what this is really about for them.

It is worth noting that initially, this was a necessity because under COVID-19 protocols at the time, it wasn't realistic to ask 3,000 applicants to sit for a proctored exam during the worst phase of infections and deaths. This would have had to happen in January or February of 2021 and there was no way it would have worked.

I actually would have been fine with maintaining some testing structure - the existence of the tests wasn't the problem, it was their use as a gatekeeping element. A student under the previous system could have scored in the 99th percentile on both the Quant-Q and the ACT Aspire Science, but if they scored in the 74th percentile on the Aspire Reading, they'd be ineligible to be semifinalists. That process was broken too.

There's nothing wrong with testing as long as it's used as a data point amongst many others in a holistic admissions process and cannot be used by outsiders as evidence of racism in the process. Unfortunately, that's precisely what happens when parents of students whose strongest metric is their exam scores claim that admissions officers are dinging their kids on personality scores because of race - when it's actually their personality.

But they threw out testing. Fine. Now no one can leverage that advantage. But then they punished kids for what their parents do for a living, so instead of equalizing the advantage they just shifted it to another group of kids.

And even further, the lack of differentiation of curriculum in middle school, maybe norm’s for each county, also punished kids who take more rigorous workloads.

They didn’t even consider base schools when assigning their 1.5% to AAP centers.

They achieved their goal. But the results coming in also confirm the critics concern.

DP. No students were punished for what happened. Nor were students punished who want to go to TJ, no matter how much you complain on their behalf.

Yeah penalized in the admissions process is more accurate.

Sounds like you may not be familiar with the current admissions process. No punishment, no penalization.

[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:
If the reports from DCUM are to be believed, not all of the kids with Algebra 2 are accepted as Freshman at TJ. I would assume the ones not accepted are from Carson, Longfellow, and Cooper. I would guess that the Algebra 2 kids from the schools that tend to send fewer kids, the ones without numbers reported, are more likely to have been accepted since those are likely in the top 1.5% of the pool and would be the most likely to apply from the less represented MS.

Why would you assume that? The top 1.5% is based on essays, GPA, and experience factors. There are no bonus points given for the kid's math level.

Are there any classes on how to improve your experience factors?

experience factors include race/ethnicity. No class can change it. Other experience factors can be changed by how parent spends their time and pocket money. Does parent want to spend $120 on basketball league, flashy shoes & trendy clothes, or on Kumon?

Even just spending $20k-$40k on prep at places like Curie will make a huge difference and spread out over several years. It's much cheaper than private.

Either a troll or insane. I'm betting on insane, but it could be a troll. Hard to know anymore.

I am ok with the fool saying Curie costs 5k, 10k, 15k, or 20k, when they are cheaper than Kumon. The fool is making sure Curie receives the publicity either by desire or by chance.

DP - but I will own up to being the person who was first in on the reporting with TJ students acknowledging that their Curie courses had shown them questions that ended up on the Quant-Q exam prior to them sitting for it.

I do not know if this program still exists, but when people talk about the $5K Curie course, what they're referring to is the flagship 16-month TJ Prep program that students would register for going into their 7th grade year. This was an immensely popular course that Curie offered that was buffered by students who had reported back specific questions from when they sat for the Quant-Q exam themselves, despite having signed an agreement not to do so. Curie offers many other less expensive courses, but this was the one that made the most impact with respect to TJ Admissions.

The access to exam questions gave Curie students an enormous leg up on the remainder of the TJ Admissions population and had a large part to play in the proportion of Asian students growing from 66% in the Class of 2022, to 72.3% in the Class of 2023, to 74.9% in the Class of 2024. During that same period, the number of students that Curie claimed as TJ admits went from 50 in 2022, to 95 in 2025, to a whopping 133 in 2024. Of further interest was the fact that Curie posted the first and last names of each of those students on their social media outlets, in the process betraying the fact that they virtually 100% of the students they served were of South Asian descent.

So, to summarize and to dispel some of the myths and nonsense going around on these fora:

1) Curie had a course that was explicitly designed to get kids into TJ;
2) This course included prep for the Quant-Q exam that included access to questions and question types that they should not have had;
3) The popularity of the course exploded over the 3 year period that the Quant-Q was used;
4) The course was listed at $5K to register;
5) Based on the lists they published, it appeared to be nearly exclusive to South Asian kids;
6) It had an enormous impact on TJ Admissions for especially the Classes of 2023 and 2024. In fact, simple data analysis indicated that approximately 70% of the 2024 students of South Asian descent were Curie customers and nearly 90% of the admits from Loudoun County were as well - based on how many of the students were listed as having been also admitted to either/both of AOS and AET.

Those are the facts. Importantly, the parents and students did not pay for access to the exam - what they paid for was access to a few of the questions that were a part of the question bank that each form of the Quant-Q exam draws from. Equally importantly, Curie did nothing illegal in this process - they merely accepted information that came to them from students who sat for the exam and broke a signed pledge to not discuss the exam with anyone.

Thank you for this creative story that never happened. You have been peddling this lie for years, and intentionally or foolishly driving this forum visitors towards Curie, increasing their business multifold after admission changes. You claim to be of South Asian descent, but what caused you to internalize racism, badmouth your own ethnic group, and feel ashamed of your own culture? Is it necessary to gain acceptance or approval from the group you desperately seek to associate with now? Specifically, what's your personal beef with Curie? Were you forced to attend Curie?

1) It's not a creative story. It's something that has been confirmed publicly by TJ students who were willing to identify themselves by name.
2) I don't really care whether or not it drives more traffic to Curie. What I care about is contextualizing the need for admissions reform, and I've done that very successfully.
3) I don't care about Curie. I care about TJ, and for too long I saw too many of the wrong kids getting admitted because of prep programs like Curie that brought in students who had to work so hard to keep up with TJ that they weren't able to add anything of value to the school environment. I saw kids seriously considering self-harm (and worse, some actually following through on it) because of the insane expectations of their parents and because they were dropped into a program that they couldn't handle - a phenomenon, by the way, that has largely disappeared under the new admissions process.
4) I am anonymous, so there isn't any societal benefit that I'm receiving from informing the public about what's actually going on. It's nothing more than the internal satisfaction from assisting in telling the full story.
5) It's a key feature of conservatives that they simply can't understand why someone would do something unless they have something to gain from it. I'm glad that's not an affliction I share.

The more you talk the more it appears you have a real deep seated hatred for Curie. From the timeline you describe above, at least for past five years you have been going to bed every night hating an enrichment business and its student community supposedly from a single ethnic group. Next few years there will be more students unknown to you who will be enrolling there, but your head is set to hate them all too. Do you understand the gravity of your mental issue?

1) Nope, no deep-seated hatred for them. The only real problem I have with them was their decision to publish the first and last names of all of the students who were admitted from their program, which unintentionally created issues for those kids once they got to TJ because they were branded as "Curie kids". I am betting that the permission for them to do so came from the parents and not from the students.
2) The entire Curie ordeal became apparent to me in late 2020, so more like three and a half years
3) Have never hated the kids at all. It's not their fault that so many of them were wedged into an environment at TJ that probably wasn't the best fit for them, and it's not their fault that other more deserving students were left out in the cold as a consequence. I'm bothered by the old admissions process that incentivized parents to put their children through that experience, but it doesn't exist anymore, thank goodness. And I'm bothered by the fact that several of the Curie kids probably could have done better in their college admissions process had they remained at their base school, and that some of the kids who the Curie kids replaced missed out on what TJ could have done for their college resumes because they were better fits.
4) As much as it may seem different to you, my knowledge and understanding about the Curie situation really doesn't take up too much of my time. It did when I was doing my original research back in August of 2020, but we were in the midst of the pandemic at that point, so it's not like I had much else to do

Your 5k, 10k, 20k, etc... claim about Curie cost versus others claiming it is cheaper than Kumon is puzzling for parents considering enrichment. With your years of research knowledge, can you do a true cost comparison of Curie versus Kumon as an alternative for 6th to 8th grade duration?

Kumon hasn't been confirmed to have had access to TJ Admissions exam questions, so I haven't done any research into them.

I am also not the poster who has made mentions of higher amounts than $5K for Curie courses. I have no idea what any of their other courses cost because as far as I know, they didn't include access to TJ exam questions.

What I do know is that Kumon appears to serve students who are not of South Asian descent - a claim which I'm not sure Curie can muster.

you are too busy obsessing over Curie. When was last time you been to a Kumon? A kumon center without Asian American students is just table and chairs with lights on. that's true with any low cost enrichment center in NoVa.

Perhaps that's true, but there's a big difference between "Asian American" and "South Asian". There are also a couple of enrichment centers right near where I live and there isn't any sort of obvious racial/ethnic tilt that I can see.

it appears your mental issue is microscopically creepier how are the two different?

You're kidding, right? "South Asian" encompasses essentially those of Indian, Sri Lankan, and perhaps Bangladeshi descent, while "Asian American" would add those of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Middle Eastern descent.

Curie only serves the former. Which is pretty gross, when you get right down to it.

what is gross? why should we care what these countries are and how is it even relevant to the topic of enrichment being discussed here?

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Anonymous wrote:It's amazing how often this poster brings up this Curie and TJ thing.

Ultimately though, even if this ridiculous fairytale were true, the admissions response was not to fix the testing process but instead remove testing almost entirely.

People also forget that there were two other tests, but those are gone as well.

The unnecessary reference to "conservatives" reveals what this is really about for them.

It is worth noting that initially, this was a necessity because under COVID-19 protocols at the time, it wasn't realistic to ask 3,000 applicants to sit for a proctored exam during the worst phase of infections and deaths. This would have had to happen in January or February of 2021 and there was no way it would have worked.

I actually would have been fine with maintaining some testing structure - the existence of the tests wasn't the problem, it was their use as a gatekeeping element. A student under the previous system could have scored in the 99th percentile on both the Quant-Q and the ACT Aspire Science, but if they scored in the 74th percentile on the Aspire Reading, they'd be ineligible to be semifinalists. That process was broken too.

There's nothing wrong with testing as long as it's used as a data point amongst many others in a holistic admissions process and cannot be used by outsiders as evidence of racism in the process. Unfortunately, that's precisely what happens when parents of students whose strongest metric is their exam scores claim that admissions officers are dinging their kids on personality scores because of race - when it's actually their personality.

But they threw out testing. Fine. Now no one can leverage that advantage. But then they punished kids for what their parents do for a living, so instead of equalizing the advantage they just shifted it to another group of kids.

And even further, the lack of differentiation of curriculum in middle school, maybe norm’s for each county, also punished kids who take more rigorous workloads.

They didn’t even consider base schools when assigning their 1.5% to AAP centers.

They achieved their goal. But the results coming in also confirm the critics concern.

DP. No students were punished for what happened. Nor were students punished who want to go to TJ, no matter how much you complain on their behalf.

Yeah penalized in the admissions process is more accurate.

Sounds like you may not be familiar with the current admissions process. No punishment, no penalization.

Some kids receive points because they get free lunch. Kids whose parents make a certain amount of money don’t. Seems like a penalty that is out of a kids control.