TJ's Maligned Class of 2025 Produces MORE Regeneron Top 300s and ANOTHER Finalist

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Anonymous wrote:https://www.fcps.edu/news/tjhsst-student-named-finalist-2025-regeneron-science-talent-search

Eight Top 300 finalists this year as opposed to seven last year. But I thought that the new admissions process was leaving top talent behind?

No other FCPS school produced a top 300 finalist this year...

TJ will soon be back at #1.

No. There were more SOL failures in 2022-23 than the year prior, so the next ranking may well be lower.

Jeez, now we're maligning the class of 2025?

I mean the class of 2026.

Honestly I think the student body is improving. I don't know if they are easing off the "experience factors" or if students are self selecting themselves into the applicant pool better this year.

Improving? SOLs are worse, Ranking fell from 1st to 14th

False. TJ was #5 before moving to #14.

Of course, #1 to #5, and now #14, the downward trend is clear. This year is expected to be even worse, which is why FCPS is taking proactive steps by announcing admin level changes.

#5 was using data from before the admissions change.

No trend.

People are also fond of forgetting that TJ’s USNWR ranking was frequently in the teens under Dr. Glazer and returned to #1 for several consecutive years under Dr. Bonitatibus.

But that’s inconvenient to the narrative so 💤

Not exactly but she did bring the rankings up to 1 for a couple of years.

2015 #3
2016 #5
2017 #6
2018 #6
2019 #10
2020 #4
2021 #1
2022 #1
2023 #5
2024 #14

Glazer took over as principal in 2007 and witnessed the lowest rating in the school’s history. #20 in I believe 2012 or 13.

That was after the last time they tried to achieve "diversity" at TJ.

Yes. In TJ’s history, there have been three attempts to implement race-based admissions. Each time, rankings dropped, and students resisted being used as test subjects for political agendas. Why should students with the lowest math readiness spend five to six hours after school struggling, only to end up with Cs and Ds? Enduring four years of hardship just to fulfill a diversity quota is unsustainable.

Literal nonsense. Every word of this is fabricated.

I know of 2 attempts, I didn't know about the third. They have always gone back to merit after the quality of graduates degraded but we'll have to see if sanity will prevail in times like these. Sanity seems to be experiencing a headwind.

What is the other successful attempt at improving equity at TJ that you claim to “know of”?

Loading bottom 100+ seats in a class with the lowest-level Algebra 1 students and having them struggle year after year, even in basic courses, is not equity. It's exploiting students for political purposes. Unsustainable, as proven multiple times in the past.

It’s so funny… literally the only people who think that TJ is somehow on the decline are the folks who just can’t get past losing out on the admissions process.

It’s not a thing that any reputable outlet is actually reporting on at all. It’s just an increasingly detached group of anonymous keyboard warriors parroting the nonsense that Asra Nomani pukes up in a pathetic attempt to remain relevant.

DP

I have had kids at TJ in the past and now.

I have mixed feelings on this.
There is a much larger population of obviously struggling kids than in the past. This is based on observations of past and present students.
This has definitely reduced stress ad given the most talented kids the bandwidth to do more things beyond just struggling to maintain a competitive GPA.

Your GPA will still suffer at TJ but the most competitive kids will be able to maintain A's a lot easier than in the past.
I think this has given a lot of kids the bandwidth to do more things (like regeneron).

They could simulate this dynamic by adopting a grading policy that ore closely approximates the GPA these students would get at a base school.
Some magnet high schools do this by bumping anyone that gets a 5 on the AP exam to an A, so teachers start to calibrate their grades to a 5 on the AP exam, maybe even a 4.

We will soon see how the class of 2025 did GPA wise and SAT wise and where they went to college so all this arguing is really just like arguing about who is going to win this year's superbowl. We're all going to know soon enough.

DP? Sockpuppet!

No. Grade inflation from certain bottom base school shouldn't be brought into TJ. Admissions need to be rigorous, then gimmicks wont be necessary.

Yeah, that's not a sockpuppet. They're responding to me.

I would agree that the population of struggling students is larger, but I wouldn't call it *much* larger. I will say that the new crop of students is much less adept at hiding their struggles - that's where you see a concrete difference. In the old TJ, you would see a ton of kids getting outside help because they were advanced beyond their talent level, especially in math. The extra tutoring required to keep up appearances frequently prevented them from fully engaging with extracurriculars, which of course depressed their college outcomes.

You'll see a little dip overall with the 2025s I think in terms of GPA and SAT because they'll be hit the most from return from Covid and they won't have the benefits of the years of experience the staff has with the new admissions process. It'll likely trend upward from here with the following classes.

In what way is the class is 2025 hit harder by COVID than the class of 2024? It the class of 2026? You're already making excuses for their performance. So whether you armor it of not, you don't believe that the current selection method is any good at selecting for merit either.

TJ is not the only school that experienced COVID. Why aren't we seeing these sort of plummeting scores at schools like Stuyvesant?

Stuyvesant has a test-based admissions process, which is quite different from TJ, which takes a more holistic approach that considers personal factors, ethnic diversity, and middle school quotas. When it comes to COVID, its impact has been felt differently in Northern Virginia compared to the area where Stuyvesant is located, allowing the already merit evaluated Stuy students to manage academics more efficiently than TJ class, which is diversified in all ways including academics. For a apples to apples comparison, it’s best to compare Stuyvesant as a whole to the top quarter of TJ, which would represent the most academically focused students.

I get that. I'm saying that the drop you see in academic performance isn't from covid, its from the change in admissions policy.

A drop in standardized exam scores can absolutely be attributed to the change in admissions process because the new process no longer overselects for test taking ability. That’s neither news nor illustrative of anything meaningful.

If a baseball team had a minimum speed requirement for a dozen years and then all of a sudden stopped having one, you would expect their average team speed to decline - but they might win more games because while speed is a nice thing to have in baseball, it certainly isn’t everything.

So I’d challenge you to cite where “academic performance” is materially impacted by the new process in a way that can be distinguished from COVID-related impact.

I don't know where this notion that test taking ability is some narrow measure of cognitive ability.
There is no special "test taking ability" divorced from cognitive ability
These tests roughly measure cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is a combination of talent and effort.

This notion that some people are good at tests and others are not is just another way of saying smart people are good at tests and dumb people are not.

That is pretty much what 100 years of science and data tell us.
There is more evidence for the validity of testing than there is for global warming.

We know this as much as we know anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv_Cr1a6rj4

There absolutely exists a test taking ability skill that is separate from cognitive ability.

If there weren't, you wouldn't have hundreds of billions of dollars every year invested in test prep through courses, books, and videos. Kids would just show up and take an exam. But parents want to know exactly what format the questions will be in, will they be multiple choice, is there a penalty for guessing, and so on and so on. It's frequently a different skill set for every exam, but it absolutely exists.

And when you're talking about a high-stakes exam where time is a factor, exam-specific preparation can make all the difference.

Imagine a scenario where two students are getting ready to take a specialized Algebra 1 exam at the end of their year of Algebra 1. You have to correctly guess which student will score higher on the exam or else a family member dies. Student A got a 92 in the course and has never seen the format of this exam before, while student B got a 90 in the course and has spent the last three months getting ready for this specific exam.

You'd be a moron to pick student A - and that's why test taking skill and preparation matter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.fcps.edu/news/tjhsst-student-named-finalist-2025-regeneron-science-talent-search

Eight Top 300 finalists this year as opposed to seven last year. But I thought that the new admissions process was leaving top talent behind?

No other FCPS school produced a top 300 finalist this year...

TJ will soon be back at #1.

No. There were more SOL failures in 2022-23 than the year prior, so the next ranking may well be lower.

Jeez, now we're maligning the class of 2025?

I mean the class of 2026.

Honestly I think the student body is improving. I don't know if they are easing off the "experience factors" or if students are self selecting themselves into the applicant pool better this year.

Improving? SOLs are worse, Ranking fell from 1st to 14th

False. TJ was #5 before moving to #14.

Of course, #1 to #5, and now #14, the downward trend is clear. This year is expected to be even worse, which is why FCPS is taking proactive steps by announcing admin level changes.

#5 was using data from before the admissions change.

No trend.

People are also fond of forgetting that TJ’s USNWR ranking was frequently in the teens under Dr. Glazer and returned to #1 for several consecutive years under Dr. Bonitatibus.

But that’s inconvenient to the narrative so 💤

Not exactly but she did bring the rankings up to 1 for a couple of years.

2015 #3
2016 #5
2017 #6
2018 #6
2019 #10
2020 #4
2021 #1
2022 #1
2023 #5
2024 #14

Glazer took over as principal in 2007 and witnessed the lowest rating in the school’s history. #20 in I believe 2012 or 13.

That was after the last time they tried to achieve "diversity" at TJ.

Yes. In TJ’s history, there have been three attempts to implement race-based admissions. Each time, rankings dropped, and students resisted being used as test subjects for political agendas. Why should students with the lowest math readiness spend five to six hours after school struggling, only to end up with Cs and Ds? Enduring four years of hardship just to fulfill a diversity quota is unsustainable.

Literal nonsense. Every word of this is fabricated.

I know of 2 attempts, I didn't know about the third. They have always gone back to merit after the quality of graduates degraded but we'll have to see if sanity will prevail in times like these. Sanity seems to be experiencing a headwind.

What is the other successful attempt at improving equity at TJ that you claim to “know of”?

It was an unsuccessful attempt. They made the admissions process much more holistic around 2010 and they ended up with a class that was whiter, richer and dumber.

Cite your stats both with respect to demographics and academic results, please. This doesn’t track at all.

+1

PP is full of sht.

If you want to keep denying issues then you are going to keep ending up with his like trump in the white house.

These are serious problems and you can't just wish them away or try and gaslight people into thinking they don't exist.

If they are so serious, show your work. It shouldn’t be that hard if it’s some devastating massive-scale problem.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.fcps.edu/news/tjhsst-student-named-finalist-2025-regeneron-science-talent-search

Eight Top 300 finalists this year as opposed to seven last year. But I thought that the new admissions process was leaving top talent behind?

No other FCPS school produced a top 300 finalist this year...

TJ will soon be back at #1.

No. There were more SOL failures in 2022-23 than the year prior, so the next ranking may well be lower.

Jeez, now we're maligning the class of 2025?

I mean the class of 2026.

Honestly I think the student body is improving. I don't know if they are easing off the "experience factors" or if students are self selecting themselves into the applicant pool better this year.

Improving? SOLs are worse, Ranking fell from 1st to 14th

False. TJ was #5 before moving to #14.

Of course, #1 to #5, and now #14, the downward trend is clear. This year is expected to be even worse, which is why FCPS is taking proactive steps by announcing admin level changes.

#5 was using data from before the admissions change.

No trend.

People are also fond of forgetting that TJ’s USNWR ranking was frequently in the teens under Dr. Glazer and returned to #1 for several consecutive years under Dr. Bonitatibus.

But that’s inconvenient to the narrative so 💤

Not exactly but she did bring the rankings up to 1 for a couple of years.

2015 #3
2016 #5
2017 #6
2018 #6
2019 #10
2020 #4
2021 #1
2022 #1
2023 #5
2024 #14

Glazer took over as principal in 2007 and witnessed the lowest rating in the school’s history. #20 in I believe 2012 or 13.

That was after the last time they tried to achieve "diversity" at TJ.

Yes. In TJ’s history, there have been three attempts to implement race-based admissions. Each time, rankings dropped, and students resisted being used as test subjects for political agendas. Why should students with the lowest math readiness spend five to six hours after school struggling, only to end up with Cs and Ds? Enduring four years of hardship just to fulfill a diversity quota is unsustainable.

Literal nonsense. Every word of this is fabricated.

I know of 2 attempts, I didn't know about the third. They have always gone back to merit after the quality of graduates degraded but we'll have to see if sanity will prevail in times like these. Sanity seems to be experiencing a headwind.

What is the other successful attempt at improving equity at TJ that you claim to “know of”?

It was an unsuccessful attempt. They made the admissions process much more holistic around 2010 and they ended up with a class that was whiter, richer and dumber.

Cite your stats both with respect to demographics and academic results, please. This doesn’t track at all.

+1

PP is full of sht.

If you want to keep denying issues then you are going to keep ending up with his like trump in the white house.

These are serious problems and you can't just wish them away or try and gaslight people into thinking they don't exist.

If they are so serious, show your work. It shouldn’t be that hard if it’s some devastating massive-scale problem.

I guess it was self evident that trump is a devastating massive scale problem.
If you don't believe that then I don't think there is anything I can say that will convince you.
It takes too many excuses to get to the point where you don't consider Trump a problem for me to unravel.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:https://www.fcps.edu/news/tjhsst-student-named-finalist-2025-regeneron-science-talent-search

Eight Top 300 finalists this year as opposed to seven last year. But I thought that the new admissions process was leaving top talent behind?

No other FCPS school produced a top 300 finalist this year...

TJ will soon be back at #1.

No. There were more SOL failures in 2022-23 than the year prior, so the next ranking may well be lower.

Jeez, now we're maligning the class of 2025?

I mean the class of 2026.

Honestly I think the student body is improving. I don't know if they are easing off the "experience factors" or if students are self selecting themselves into the applicant pool better this year.

Improving? SOLs are worse, Ranking fell from 1st to 14th

False. TJ was #5 before moving to #14.

Of course, #1 to #5, and now #14, the downward trend is clear. This year is expected to be even worse, which is why FCPS is taking proactive steps by announcing admin level changes.

#5 was using data from before the admissions change.

No trend.

People are also fond of forgetting that TJ’s USNWR ranking was frequently in the teens under Dr. Glazer and returned to #1 for several consecutive years under Dr. Bonitatibus.

But that’s inconvenient to the narrative so 💤

Not exactly but she did bring the rankings up to 1 for a couple of years.

2015 #3
2016 #5
2017 #6
2018 #6
2019 #10
2020 #4
2021 #1
2022 #1
2023 #5
2024 #14

Glazer took over as principal in 2007 and witnessed the lowest rating in the school’s history. #20 in I believe 2012 or 13.

That was after the last time they tried to achieve "diversity" at TJ.

Yes. In TJ’s history, there have been three attempts to implement race-based admissions. Each time, rankings dropped, and students resisted being used as test subjects for political agendas. Why should students with the lowest math readiness spend five to six hours after school struggling, only to end up with Cs and Ds? Enduring four years of hardship just to fulfill a diversity quota is unsustainable.

Literal nonsense. Every word of this is fabricated.

I know of 2 attempts, I didn't know about the third. They have always gone back to merit after the quality of graduates degraded but we'll have to see if sanity will prevail in times like these. Sanity seems to be experiencing a headwind.

What is the other successful attempt at improving equity at TJ that you claim to “know of”?

Loading bottom 100+ seats in a class with the lowest-level Algebra 1 students and having them struggle year after year, even in basic courses, is not equity. It's exploiting students for political purposes. Unsustainable, as proven multiple times in the past.

It’s so funny… literally the only people who think that TJ is somehow on the decline are the folks who just can’t get past losing out on the admissions process.

It’s not a thing that any reputable outlet is actually reporting on at all. It’s just an increasingly detached group of anonymous keyboard warriors parroting the nonsense that Asra Nomani pukes up in a pathetic attempt to remain relevant.

DP

I have had kids at TJ in the past and now.

I have mixed feelings on this.
There is a much larger population of obviously struggling kids than in the past. This is based on observations of past and present students.
This has definitely reduced stress ad given the most talented kids the bandwidth to do more things beyond just struggling to maintain a competitive GPA.

Your GPA will still suffer at TJ but the most competitive kids will be able to maintain A's a lot easier than in the past.
I think this has given a lot of kids the bandwidth to do more things (like regeneron).

They could simulate this dynamic by adopting a grading policy that ore closely approximates the GPA these students would get at a base school.
Some magnet high schools do this by bumping anyone that gets a 5 on the AP exam to an A, so teachers start to calibrate their grades to a 5 on the AP exam, maybe even a 4.

We will soon see how the class of 2025 did GPA wise and SAT wise and where they went to college so all this arguing is really just like arguing about who is going to win this year's superbowl. We're all going to know soon enough.

DP? Sockpuppet!

No. Grade inflation from certain bottom base school shouldn't be brought into TJ. Admissions need to be rigorous, then gimmicks wont be necessary.

Yeah, that's not a sockpuppet. They're responding to me.

I would agree that the population of struggling students is larger, but I wouldn't call it *much* larger. I will say that the new crop of students is much less adept at hiding their struggles - that's where you see a concrete difference. In the old TJ, you would see a ton of kids getting outside help because they were advanced beyond their talent level, especially in math. The extra tutoring required to keep up appearances frequently prevented them from fully engaging with extracurriculars, which of course depressed their college outcomes.

You'll see a little dip overall with the 2025s I think in terms of GPA and SAT because they'll be hit the most from return from Covid and they won't have the benefits of the years of experience the staff has with the new admissions process. It'll likely trend upward from here with the following classes.

In what way is the class is 2025 hit harder by COVID than the class of 2024? It the class of 2026? You're already making excuses for their performance. So whether you armor it of not, you don't believe that the current selection method is any good at selecting for merit either.

TJ is not the only school that experienced COVID. Why aren't we seeing these sort of plummeting scores at schools like Stuyvesant?

Stuyvesant has a test-based admissions process, which is quite different from TJ, which takes a more holistic approach that considers personal factors, ethnic diversity, and middle school quotas. When it comes to COVID, its impact has been felt differently in Northern Virginia compared to the area where Stuyvesant is located, allowing the already merit evaluated Stuy students to manage academics more efficiently than TJ class, which is diversified in all ways including academics. For a apples to apples comparison, it’s best to compare Stuyvesant as a whole to the top quarter of TJ, which would represent the most academically focused students.

I get that. I'm saying that the drop you see in academic performance isn't from covid, its from the change in admissions policy.

A drop in standardized exam scores can absolutely be attributed to the change in admissions process because the new process no longer overselects for test taking ability. That’s neither news nor illustrative of anything meaningful.

If a baseball team had a minimum speed requirement for a dozen years and then all of a sudden stopped having one, you would expect their average team speed to decline - but they might win more games because while speed is a nice thing to have in baseball, it certainly isn’t everything.

So I’d challenge you to cite where “academic performance” is materially impacted by the new process in a way that can be distinguished from COVID-related impact.

I don't know where this notion that test taking ability is some narrow measure of cognitive ability.
There is no special "test taking ability" divorced from cognitive ability
These tests roughly measure cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is a combination of talent and effort.

This notion that some people are good at tests and others are not is just another way of saying smart people are good at tests and dumb people are not.

That is pretty much what 100 years of science and data tell us.
There is more evidence for the validity of testing than there is for global warming.

We know this as much as we know anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv_Cr1a6rj4

There absolutely exists a test taking ability skill that is separate from cognitive ability.

If there weren't, you wouldn't have hundreds of billions of dollars every year invested in test prep through courses, books, and videos. Kids would just show up and take an exam. But parents want to know exactly what format the questions will be in, will they be multiple choice, is there a penalty for guessing, and so on and so on. It's frequently a different skill set for every exam, but it absolutely exists.

And when you're talking about a high-stakes exam where time is a factor, exam-specific preparation can make all the difference.

Imagine a scenario where two students are getting ready to take a specialized Algebra 1 exam at the end of their year of Algebra 1. You have to correctly guess which student will score higher on the exam or else a family member dies. Student A got a 92 in the course and has never seen the format of this exam before, while student B got a 90 in the course and has spent the last three months getting ready for this specific exam.

You'd be a moron to pick student A - and that's why test taking skill and preparation matter.

If you are relying on unfamiliar testing format to win the argument that tests are not good measures of cognitive ability then your argument is very weak.

If one student is a better algebra student and spent the last 3 months studying algebra and 1 week studying "test taking techniques" and the weaker algebra student spent 1 week studying algebra and 3 months studying "test taking techniques," the better algebra student that spent most of their time studying algebra will generally do better.

The "test taking technique" part of standardized tests is trivially simple to learn.

The fact that people spend money on it says nothing about its value and frankly a lot of it is to make sure your kid spends that time studying the content not the 'test taking technique". Bitcoin is at $100,000 it's worth about as much as a tulip or an NFT.

Once again, I have almost a century of peer reviewed research on my side and you have your intuition.

[Anonymous]

The class of 2025 may be the strongest TJ class in decades!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The class of 2025 may be the strongest TJ class in decades!

strongest? LoL Most diverse at the expense of leaving out the URMs with better merit qualifications! Remedial instruction is now part of TJ, with major achievement being the ranking drop from 1st to 14th, so far. Top 100 students continue to bring the accolades with no diversity there, but masks the trouble brewing in the bottom 100 full of diversity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The class of 2025 may be the strongest TJ class in decades!

strongest? LoL Most diverse at the expense of leaving out the URMs with better merit qualifications! Remedial instruction is now part of TJ, with major achievement being the ranking drop from 1st to 14th, so far. Top 100 students continue to bring the accolades with no diversity there, but masks the trouble brewing in the bottom 100 full of diversity.

TJ has had “remedial” instruction for many years.

It dropped from 5th to 14th.