TJ Discrimination Case

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

So....this would place a pretty significant burden on the application reviewers, but if FCPS could find enough of them and train them adequately, you'd have a workable system here. It would retain a lot of the benefits of the new system while clawing back some of the measurables that would help the right kids to be rewarded by the changes.

They had all this admissions work under the old system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

I'm genuinely impressed by this. I've been on the side of the Coalition for most of this conversation and I actually could see a plan like this working very well to balance the respective goals. Well said.

I don't think they need to be giving out automatic spots to every middle school in neighboring counties. I would rather these kids be in the open pool only, but I'm not sure what deal they have with the other school systems, or what is required by state law.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

Good lord. It's like some of you think FCPS is basically TJ, deserving of endless attention and fine-tuning, and 197 or so other schools that can be ignored indefinitely while they build a better TJ mousetrap.

Seriously, go to hell. The last thing they need to do is take up all the bandwidth yet again with more changes to the admissions process.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

Good lord. It's like some of you think FCPS is basically TJ, deserving of endless attention and fine-tuning, and 197 or so other schools that can be ignored indefinitely while they build a better TJ mousetrap.

Seriously, go to hell. The last thing they need to do is take up all the bandwidth yet again with more changes to the admissions process.

PP. It's the flagship high school, and it's not going to stop being the flagship high school any time soon.

Also, you're in an AAP forum on an anonymous website. We're all already in hell.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

I'm genuinely impressed by this. I've been on the side of the Coalition for most of this conversation and I actually could see a plan like this working very well to balance the respective goals. Well said.

I don't think they need to be giving out automatic spots to every middle school in neighboring counties. I would rather these kids be in the open pool only, but I'm not sure what deal they have with the other school systems, or what is required by state law.

I posted the proposal. I would also be in favor of not affording automatic admissions to middle schools in non-FCPS counties, but I am of the impression that given it's a Governor's School, that would be a requirement.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

So....this would place a pretty significant burden on the application reviewers, but if FCPS could find enough of them and train them adequately, you'd have a workable system here. It would retain a lot of the benefits of the new system while clawing back some of the measurables that would help the right kids to be rewarded by the changes.

They had all this admissions work under the old system.

Posted the proposal. This is not quite true. I acknowledge that it would be a pretty big ask because, unlike the old process, there is no mechanism for cutting the pool in half like there was previously with the exam.

I'm anticipating a significant increase in applications, and a full holistic review that involves looking at essays, recommendations, and whatever exams the student submits.

I'm envisioning that each reviewer, in the initial round, could be responsible for evaluating some 75-100 applications. For some reviewers, that might entail reviewing the entire slate for several of the less-represented schools' entire application slates, while for others, it might mean that a team of 2-3 are reviewing the applications for Longfellow or Carson. This initial review would be designed to identify the students who would receive the allocated seats from each school, along with an additional group of candidates from each school's slate who should be up for review for the unallocated pool.

So for example, the team of two reviewing the 175 applications from Longfellow would forward the 6 students who would receive the allocated seats along with perhaps another 60-80 who warrant further review for the unallocated slots.

The one person reviewing applications from Stone, Liberty, Franklin, and Herndon would forward the 3 students from each school who should receive their allocated seats along with another 15-20 for further consideration. And so on and so on.

A team of 3-5 would evaluate the private school applications and sort them into piles for consideration and non-consideration.

Eventually, you're looking at a pool of, say, 1000 applicants for 300 or so unallocated seats. And now you pull in their second quarter grades and review those applications against each other, while adding in the 200-odd qualified applications you'll get from private and homeschool students every year. Without identifying who has received the allocated seats, you reach out to these 1300-1500 folks and let them know that they are still being considered for admission, and you let the rest know that they are not.

And when you're ready, you release the class of 550, again without identifying who received an allocated seat and who didn't.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

Good lord. It's like some of you think FCPS is basically TJ, deserving of endless attention and fine-tuning, and 197 or so other schools that can be ignored indefinitely while they build a better TJ mousetrap.

Seriously, go to hell. The last thing they need to do is take up all the bandwidth yet again with more changes to the admissions process.

PP. It's the flagship high school, and it's not going to stop being the flagship high school any time soon.

Also, you're in an AAP forum on an anonymous website. We're all already in hell.

Okay this made me laugh

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

So....this would place a pretty significant burden on the application reviewers, but if FCPS could find enough of them and train them adequately, you'd have a workable system here. It would retain a lot of the benefits of the new system while clawing back some of the measurables that would help the right kids to be rewarded by the changes.

They had all this admissions work under the old system.

People were buying their way by getting the test answers with the old system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

Good lord. It's like some of you think FCPS is basically TJ, deserving of endless attention and fine-tuning, and 197 or so other schools that can be ignored indefinitely while they build a better TJ mousetrap.

Seriously, go to hell. The last thing they need to do is take up all the bandwidth yet again with more changes to the admissions process.

PP. It's the flagship high school, and it's not going to stop being the flagship high school any time soon.

Also, you're in an AAP forum on an anonymous website. We're all already in hell.

Yes, they're lavishing all this time and effort on kids who would be fine if they did nothing for them. Meanwhile the rest of the school system is a dumpster fire.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

Good lord. It's like some of you think FCPS is basically TJ, deserving of endless attention and fine-tuning, and 197 or so other schools that can be ignored indefinitely while they build a better TJ mousetrap.

Seriously, go to hell. The last thing they need to do is take up all the bandwidth yet again with more changes to the admissions process.

PP. It's the flagship high school, and it's not going to stop being the flagship high school any time soon.

Also, you're in an AAP forum on an anonymous website. We're all already in hell.

Yes, they're lavishing all this time and effort on kids who would be fine if they did nothing for them. Meanwhile the rest of the school system is a dumpster fire.

The school system is not a dumpster fire, there are many people who are happy with the education their kids are receiving. Those people are less likely to be posting here. You will find the folks who are disgruntled attracted to boards like this and people who are looking for information. Overall, FCPS is a solid school system that provides a good to excellent education. There is room for improvement but many of the schools that are struggling are Title 1 schools that contain a population that tends to struggle in every school district across the country. The issue is less the school and more larger societal issues that are near impossible to solve and tend to be cyclical. And that sucks but I am not calling a good to excellent school district a disaster because they cannot solve the problems that no one else in the country has been able to solve. Problems that have been studied and approached for 50 or more years.

And I want the school district to do more then provide an effort where kids do "fine." I want the school district to try and develop and promote programs that encourage excellence and not just being fine. TJ is a great opportunity to do just that. Kids who are bright and motivated should be able to find an environment that encourages them and pushes them. I want more Language Immersion programs and STEM ES/MS/HS for kids. I would love a school for the arts and a couple fo pure votech schools. I want kids to find places to go for school that meet the basic requirements for graduation but also encourages them in areas that they are interested. Fairfax County, Virginia, the Country would be far better off if we had schools that allowed kids to work towards a degree that serves their needs. For some kids that means a school like TJ that pushes them academically. For other kids that should be programs in trades that allow kids to leave school and start to work as a plumber or carpenter or auto mechanic or a nurse. It could be that those VoTech schools would help kids who are struggling from those Title 1 schools to find a place where they are comfortable and get jobs that help them break their families cycle and land a job in a trade that helps them move out of poverty.

So yeah, I am fine with finding a way to help TJ meet the needs of the kids who want a heavy STEM education and are bright. And I think that it needs to be available to kids across the county, even those who don't have the enrichment opportunities. I think we should be looking for ways to add more schools like TJ that meet other kids needs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

Good lord. It's like some of you think FCPS is basically TJ, deserving of endless attention and fine-tuning, and 197 or so other schools that can be ignored indefinitely while they build a better TJ mousetrap.

Seriously, go to hell. The last thing they need to do is take up all the bandwidth yet again with more changes to the admissions process.

PP. It's the flagship high school, and it's not going to stop being the flagship high school any time soon.

Also, you're in an AAP forum on an anonymous website. We're all already in hell.

Yes, they're lavishing all this time and effort on kids who would be fine if they did nothing for them. Meanwhile the rest of the school system is a dumpster fire.

The school system is not a dumpster fire, there are many people who are happy with the education their kids are receiving. Those people are less likely to be posting here. You will find the folks who are disgruntled attracted to boards like this and people who are looking for information. Overall, FCPS is a solid school system that provides a good to excellent education. There is room for improvement but many of the schools that are struggling are Title 1 schools that contain a population that tends to struggle in every school district across the country. The issue is less the school and more larger societal issues that are near impossible to solve and tend to be cyclical. And that sucks but I am not calling a good to excellent school district a disaster because they cannot solve the problems that no one else in the country has been able to solve. Problems that have been studied and approached for 50 or more years.

And I want the school district to do more then provide an effort where kids do "fine." I want the school district to try and develop and promote programs that encourage excellence and not just being fine. TJ is a great opportunity to do just that. Kids who are bright and motivated should be able to find an environment that encourages them and pushes them. I want more Language Immersion programs and STEM ES/MS/HS for kids. I would love a school for the arts and a couple fo pure votech schools. I want kids to find places to go for school that meet the basic requirements for graduation but also encourages them in areas that they are interested. Fairfax County, Virginia, the Country would be far better off if we had schools that allowed kids to work towards a degree that serves their needs. For some kids that means a school like TJ that pushes them academically. For other kids that should be programs in trades that allow kids to leave school and start to work as a plumber or carpenter or auto mechanic or a nurse. It could be that those VoTech schools would help kids who are struggling from those Title 1 schools to find a place where they are comfortable and get jobs that help them break their families cycle and land a job in a trade that helps them move out of poverty.

So yeah, I am fine with finding a way to help TJ meet the needs of the kids who want a heavy STEM education and are bright. And I think that it needs to be available to kids across the county, even those who don't have the enrichment opportunities. I think we should be looking for ways to add more schools like TJ that meet other kids needs.

Couldn't agree more! Well said!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

So....this would place a pretty significant burden on the application reviewers, but if FCPS could find enough of them and train them adequately, you'd have a workable system here. It would retain a lot of the benefits of the new system while clawing back some of the measurables that would help the right kids to be rewarded by the changes.

They had all this admissions work under the old system.

People were buying their way by getting the test answers with the old system.

#fakenews

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree that talent for contest math differs from being a talented mathematician. It's more about memorizing types of problems which is a rote exercise that requires a lot of time and effort. This is all good and well but we're talking about children who have barely begun their journey, and offering them an opportunity to help nurture their talents. Kids who have had years of math coaching to do well on these contests early on will be fine anywhere.

While there are repeated types of questions, usually when you get into the harder sections kids have to do more than recall previous problems.
For example, a flat solar panel is resting above a regular hexagon with different length pillars. Three are height 12,10,9 in order. What is the height of the next pillar?

These days the latter half of the AMC 10 test is very challenging, especially under the given time conditions. There are some annoying problems found in the first half, which can trip up kids (or suck up significant time, if they're not careful). The process of learning more math combined with practicing creative problem solving yields a lot of benefits in life, including finding many things at TJ relatively easy by comparison. Again it's not easy to acquire these problem solving skills; that's why the dedicated kids tend to spend a few years honing them starting from early middle school or even elementary. It's not really about IQ as others keep trying to claim. Yes, kids who are having a hard time in school, are not generally ahead with reading and learning, will have a much harder time do well in these higher level math contests, so of course having above average learning abilities will help. But it's nowhere near enough (if it was, there would be hundreds and hundreds of AIME qualifiers). I think the TJ application process should respect the kids that put in significant work and effort building up their problem solving skills, as their skills will easily transfer over to TJ and STEM in general. This is why people are skeptical of many other disadvantaged kids applying to TJ. If they're struggling at all in the classroom, how will they cope with TJ classes? It's not obvious that they will just magically adapt (some will, but likely more will not, and will end up struggling). Just because some of these kids have 'innate IQ' that is high will not help if they are academically behind and do not have the time to get up to speed. In this sense, the road to TJ has become an arms race (sadly), which makes it very difficult for some kids who have never been exposed to serious academics in middle school to be able to handle TJ without a lot of assistance. If we want to support these kids (assuming they somehow decided they really want to go to TJ late in middle school while realizing they're not prepared), then we should enroll these kids in programs designed to get them ready and up to speed by the beginning of 7th grade. Someone will have to pay for this and it's clear that schools will not support it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but making TJ a reward for kids who have had the privilege of honing these skills on their parent's dime seems unfair for a public school program that should be open to all kids. I agree these kids would do better at TJ but maybe there's a bigger picture and providing opportunities to gifted students who may not be so lucky is lifechanging.

Sure, but applying to TJ will never be perfectly fair, right? Kids (parents?) who are dead set on TJ from a very early age and assuming their kids cooperate, will always have an unfair advantage. The application process should be optimized to make it as fair as possible for all types of kids, that is optimized for an overall level of fairness. So what does this mean? Some kids from every school should be given a chance (and I assume this is the reason the 1.5% was set up). It should be recognized that kids who are underrepresented or not high income will be very disadvantaged in enrichment and learning opportunities (this is not always true, but mostly true), so the application process should figure out how to help them be successful (in both applying and thriving if they get in). Some ways would be to get the word out about TJ and encourage them to excel academically from a younger age (this is very hard to do, and frankly I'm not seeing schools will ever do this; they're not going to prioritize a small subset of kids at each school for optimizing for TJ as they have bigger problems to deal with). Other ways would be to give "points" in the application process to make up for the unfairness -- here I believe this is being done under the new system. Another thing is to remove obstacles -- this one is probably the most contentious as seen on these threads because people believe that removing certain things will 'dilute' or otherwise make it unable to compare applicants. I think there are arguments for and against (teacher recs in my opinion are telling and important and teachers generally give honest feedback, rich kids cannot really game these). Removing the test, (the most contentious change) makes it much easier for kids who don't have the same problem solving skills to at least be considered in the final round now. Is this a good thing? Perhaps, but in my view especially without recommendations, will almost certainly result in kids who are false positives... they'll get in and struggle very hard without being able to adapt. I agree of course that the old test was inadequate because it did not have a super high ceiling as some of the math contests such as the AMC 10+ do. But the old test simply could have been weighted much less, just like colleges weight the SAT. Just the use the quant test as a low bar filter; if the score is high great (it could mean kid is very strong at problem solving, or they prepped, or a combination of both, but without more info it doesn't necessarily suggest something special about the kids), but if the score is low, that could be a red flag that kids may not be able to handle the environment at TJ, so the rest of the application should be more carefully scrutinized. This is what colleges do these days; their main concern is to not only get a diverse class, but also to make sure kids can thrive and graduate (and hopefully give back at some point).

I'm the loudest and most well-informed pro-reform person on these boards. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into this response. I also know a LOT of people who are deeply connected to TJ and converse with them all the time, so I know what the conditions on the ground are.

Here's the reality of the situation right now as reported by those folks... There are absolutely a few (and I emphasize a FEW...10-20 is the number that's shared with me) kids over the past couple of years who entered TJ completely out of their element. They are receiving interventions within the first couple of months and some of them are taking to it like fish to water, while others are returning to their base schools. These are kids who absolutely never would have been selected by the old process and most of them are arriving from Prince William County, so there's the added question of the commute.

The biggest difference with these kids (as opposed to the kids in the old process that didn't belong at TJ) is that these kids are relatively easily identified early in their freshmen year as kids who need additional support to make the adjustment and their parents are enthusiastic about them getting that support. For the most part, it's not a problem of intelligence (the intelligence required to thrive at TJ is overrated), but rather of study skills and habits, which are easily correctable at such an early age. The students who didn't belong at TJ who were identified by the old process, meanwhile, didn't present as problematic until their sophomore or junior year, when they would crash and burn usually due to over-acceleration in math beyond their actual abilities. These are the kids who would be up until midnight every night during their freshmen year even without significant extracurricular attachments, but who would never seek assistance usually due to a cultural embargo against asking for help.

My argument has consistently been the following:

1) Teacher recommendations HAVE to come back, but in a reworked format so that teachers are not writing long narratives but are instead evaluating students against the rest of their classmates using a standardized form across several different metrics - most of them focused on contributions to the classroom environment.
2) The percentage of allocated seats needs to come down and should be more in the neighborhood of 1% rather than 1.5%. This would result in more than half of the class being selected through an open evaluation and less than half by allocated seats. There are simply not 6-8 students at each middle school that belong at TJ but there might be 4-5. This would also reopen the process to a few more private school kids, which would make the process more fair to them. Kids shouldn't be punished so hard in the TJ admissions process because their parents decided to send them to a private school, and right now they are.
3) The solution for exams should be optional test submissions. There should be a core group of students who are at TJ because of their excellent test taking ability - it just shouldn't be the entire class. Students would be free to submit a maximum of three relevant exam results as part of the admissions portfolio.
4) Essays should be very simple and relatively short - and proctored in-person during the school day at each respective school. They should include three questions: 1) What is your proudest accomplishment in STEM? 2) What is your proudest accomplishment outside of STEM? 3) How would you impact the learning environment at TJ?
5) The points-based rubric system should be eliminated in favor of a truly holistic evaluation process and FCPS should be very open about the fact that they are seeking a truly diverse group of individuals to fill each class - diverse across experiences, backgrounds, strengths, and talents - with the common threads between them being an interest and aptitude for STEM and a strong ability to contribute positively to an advanced learning environment.

Do these five things and you will:

1) Increase applications by at least 50%;
2) Admit the strongest class in TJ's history;
3) Immediately solve 95% of TJ's historic climate issues.

I'm genuinely impressed by this. I've been on the side of the Coalition for most of this conversation and I actually could see a plan like this working very well to balance the respective goals. Well said.

I don't think they need to be giving out automatic spots to every middle school in neighboring counties. I would rather these kids be in the open pool only, but I'm not sure what deal they have with the other school systems, or what is required by state law.

I posted the proposal. I would also be in favor of not affording automatic admissions to middle schools in non-FCPS counties, but I am of the impression that given it's a Governor's School, that would be a requirement.

The other counties pay for a number of seats under the new system and have a hard cap. FWIW - Fairfax admits something like 3% of its 8th graders to TJ. Arlington admits about 1%. It is much harder to get in from one of these neighboring counties than it is from Fairfax.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
The other counties pay for a number of seats under the new system and have a hard cap. FWIW - Fairfax admits something like 3% of its 8th graders to TJ. Arlington admits about 1%. It is much harder to get in from one of these neighboring counties than it is from Fairfax.

That's fine if it's a hard cap. I read that each Loudoun middle school also gets 1.5% of its eighth graders an automatic seat.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
The other counties pay for a number of seats under the new system and have a hard cap. FWIW - Fairfax admits something like 3% of its 8th graders to TJ. Arlington admits about 1%. It is much harder to get in from one of these neighboring counties than it is from Fairfax.

That's fine if it's a hard cap. I read that each Loudoun middle school also gets 1.5% of its eighth graders an automatic seat.

That could be the cap for the Loundoun magnet high schools. I do think Loundoun has a good number of seats at TJ so maybe it is 1.5% for each MS as well.