Walls GPA cut off

[Anonymous]

my point isn't about you or your child - it's the kids who get good grades but say and do very little else. What they deserve.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:While it might seem unfair to high-preforming kids who didn't get in or even get an interview, the process isn't exactly arbitrary or opaque. The process last year, as I understand it, had 4 criteria: 1. GPA (10%), 2. Two teacher recs (15% each), 3. Interviews (separately for student and family), and 4. Essay.

1 and 2 are submitted through MySchoolDC, and the resulting score from those 40 possible points (10% GPA + 30% for two teacher recs) determines whether the kid goes on to 3 and 4. So yes, a student with a 4.0 GPA could, in fact, not get an interview while another student with lower grades but better teacher recs might. While that outcome might not seem intuitive, it's certainly not random.

OK—if you don’t like random how about arbitrary, capricious, subjective, unreasonable, and unfair?

NP but do you actually think GPAs/grades aren’t subjective, unreasonable or unfair? Because they definitely are.

[Anonymous]

The challenge with basing so much of the score on teacher recommendations is that at small schools, if there happens to be a new, young, immature and possibly catty teacher who doesn't understand the importance of those reccs. they can create a situation where no students get in to SWW even though in past years, many students from the school got in each year. This happened at my kid's middle school last year.

i won't name names, but it does indeed seem capricious and possibly unfair to base admission on something as subjective as a whether a teacher likes a student or not. I can tell you that I found both the newly hired middle school director and the English teacher to be petty women i had no desire to have coffee with much less decide whether or not my kid should attend a high school. Staffing changes can have a major impact on a school, and especially in the 8th grade on a kid's chance at getting into high school. Another reason not to ever count on getting into a school.

[Anonymous]

It's not even a "young or catty" teacher that can throw this for a kid.

My understanding is that last year getting an interview required that the teacher give the maximum number of points in their rec. There was teacher at our middle school who didn't do this for ANY kid and nobody from the sections they taught got an interview. It was just a very poorly managed process by DCPS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's not even a "young or catty" teacher that can throw this for a kid.

My understanding is that last year getting an interview required that the teacher give the maximum number of points in their rec. There was teacher at our middle school who didn't do this for ANY kid and nobody from the sections they taught got an interview. It was just a very poorly managed process by DCPS.

How do you know that about this teacher?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The challenge with basing so much of the score on teacher recommendations is that at small schools, if there happens to be a new, young, immature and possibly catty teacher who doesn't understand the importance of those reccs. they can create a situation where no students get in to SWW even though in past years, many students from the school got in each year. This happened at my kid's middle school last year.

i won't name names, but it does indeed seem capricious and possibly unfair to base admission on something as subjective as a whether a teacher likes a student or not. I can tell you that I found both the newly hired middle school director and the English teacher to be petty women i had no desire to have coffee with much less decide whether or not my kid should attend a high school. Staffing changes can have a major impact on a school, and especially in the 8th grade on a kid's chance at getting into high school. Another reason not to ever count on getting into a school.

My kid's small middle school had something similar, but not quite as dramatic, happen. In past years, it had been punching way above its weight in terms of getting kids into Walls--the current 12th SWW grade class (which my DC is in) has 8 kids from a class of 40 8th graders (3.5 years ago, obv)--and this year's 9th grade SWW class has just 3. So it's not zero, and it may not even be a statistically significant change given the small numbers we're talking about, but if it's happening to more than one school, it does seem more likely to be a real trend. And yes, seems like one teacher can ruin an entire class's chances. It's unfortunate.

[Anonymous]

No doubt the teacher recs are given way too much weight (indeed they appear determinative for getting an interview) given that there is no way to norm these across the different schools (or even within a school when you have more than one math/english teacher). One teacher might be a high "grader" - everyone gets an A! The other might grade on a curve and only give highest marks to the best of the best (top 1-2 students).

[Anonymous]

This seems like something that should be raised with DCPS and OSSE. I don’t mind teacher recommendations but they should be at most 20% total with GPA being at least 20%. And honestly it really should be GPA 30% rec letters 10%. I feel like the rec letters should only really allow a kid on the cusp of the gpa cut off to get in if they are great.

[Anonymous]

I agree. Tht would make it more transparent.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:While it might seem unfair to high-preforming kids who didn't get in or even get an interview, the process isn't exactly arbitrary or opaque. The process last year, as I understand it, had 4 criteria: 1. GPA (10%), 2. Two teacher recs (15% each), 3. Interviews (separately for student and family), and 4. Essay.

1 and 2 are submitted through MySchoolDC, and the resulting score from those 40 possible points (10% GPA + 30% for two teacher recs) determines whether the kid goes on to 3 and 4. So yes, a student with a 4.0 GPA could, in fact, not get an interview while another student with lower grades but better teacher recs might. While that outcome might not seem intuitive, it's certainly not random.

OK—if you don’t like random how about arbitrary, capricious, subjective, unreasonable, and unfair?

NP but do you actually think GPAs/grades aren’t subjective, unreasonable or unfair? Because they definitely are.

You really think GPA is more subjective, unreasonable, and unfair than a LOR? And that LORs should count three times more than GPA?

LOL

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:While it might seem unfair to high-preforming kids who didn't get in or even get an interview, the process isn't exactly arbitrary or opaque. The process last year, as I understand it, had 4 criteria: 1. GPA (10%), 2. Two teacher recs (15% each), 3. Interviews (separately for student and family), and 4. Essay.

1 and 2 are submitted through MySchoolDC, and the resulting score from those 40 possible points (10% GPA + 30% for two teacher recs) determines whether the kid goes on to 3 and 4. So yes, a student with a 4.0 GPA could, in fact, not get an interview while another student with lower grades but better teacher recs might. While that outcome might not seem intuitive, it's certainly not random.

OK—if you don’t like random how about arbitrary, capricious, subjective, unreasonable, and unfair?

NP but do you actually think GPAs/grades aren’t subjective, unreasonable or unfair? Because they definitely are.

You really think GPA is more subjective, unreasonable, and unfair than a LOR? And that LORs should count three times more than GPA?

LOL

+1. Another Walls parent defending the indefensible.

[Anonymous]

Look, the new opaque admission process is terrible and reality is that the academic abilities of these new student cohorts have declined.

You cannot dispute data when 1/3rd of the kids are not even on grade level in math and only about 8% of the kids are above grade level.

One of the best selective high schools in DCPS is really just an average, mediocre school at best.

[Anonymous]

Bottom line, Walls does not want a school full of kids with highest GPAs/highest scores on an entry exam (that would obviously be the easiest way to draw the line - top xx number of kids calculated through GPA/entry exam score are offered spots/put on waitlist in numerical order). I think this was more or less how they used to do it - I assume they decided that entry process made the class composition too white/too something (perhaps because not enough applicants from low income schools (which in DC are overwhelmingly black) with 3.9-4.0s/high entry exam scores?) So now they use soft(er) factors in their pursuit of perfect demographics (for my 2027 kid, the interview score was the deciding factor; last year, teacher recs were make or break for getting an interview) and give these factors determinative weight to better engineer the desired class make up. Using interview/teacher recs as the determinative factor introduces a lot of variability/randomness into the selection process (inevitably interviewers/teachers have different scoring methodologies - no way to even this out across the many schools).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Bottom line, Walls does not want a school full of kids with highest GPAs/highest scores on an entry exam (that would obviously be the easiest way to draw the line - top xx number of kids calculated through GPA/entry exam score are offered spots/put on waitlist in numerical order). I think this was more or less how they used to do it - I assume they decided that entry process made the class composition too white/too something (perhaps because not enough applicants from low income schools (which in DC are overwhelmingly black) with 3.9-4.0s/high entry exam scores?) So now they use soft(er) factors in their pursuit of perfect demographics (for my 2027 kid, the interview score was the deciding factor; last year, teacher recs were make or break for getting an interview) and give these factors determinative weight to better engineer the desired class make up. Using interview/teacher recs as the determinative factor introduces a lot of variability/randomness into the selection process (inevitably interviewers/teachers have different scoring methodologies - no way to even this out across the many schools).

They required interviews even when they had the test.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Bottom line, Walls does not want a school full of kids with highest GPAs/highest scores on an entry exam (that would obviously be the easiest way to draw the line - top xx number of kids calculated through GPA/entry exam score are offered spots/put on waitlist in numerical order). I think this was more or less how they used to do it - I assume they decided that entry process made the class composition too white/too something (perhaps because not enough applicants from low income schools (which in DC are overwhelmingly black) with 3.9-4.0s/high entry exam scores?) So now they use soft(er) factors in their pursuit of perfect demographics (for my 2027 kid, the interview score was the deciding factor; last year, teacher recs were make or break for getting an interview) and give these factors determinative weight to better engineer the desired class make up. Using interview/teacher recs as the determinative factor introduces a lot of variability/randomness into the selection process (inevitably interviewers/teachers have different scoring methodologies - no way to even this out across the many schools).

They required interviews even when they had the test.

While that is true, during the testing era the interview determined the order of the waitlist and they always went deep into the waitlist and often cleared it. Now they interview and waitlist far more students, so the interview score determines who gets in. The existence of an interview didn’t change. But the interview score went from being of relatively little importance to being of almost total importance.