Reply to Timeline and Criteria for MS Magnets

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Reply to "Timeline and Criteria for MS Magnets"

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[quote=Anonymous]Can change year to year, but has not meaningfully changed in the past few.

Your 5th grader's Fall MAP-M RIT score (and their Spring one from last year if they are in Math 5/6 or somehow above that) will be "locally normed"/compared with the scores that period of others in MCPS schools with similar FARMS rates.  The cutoff, there, was 85th percentile (either Spring or Fall, if in the Math 5/6 case, above).

That could be in the upper 90s for low-FARMS schools, changing slightly year to year; they generally do not publish this, though a public information request a couple of years back showed the actual RIT cutoffs [i]for the prior year[/i].  High-FARMS schools almost certainly will see a lower cutoff, and that is by design/best practice recommendations for such data, accounting, to some degree, for the more difficult learning conditions one would expect.  If your DC receives services (individually FARMS-identified, IEP, 504 or EML) an additional allowance is given (reportedly 70th percentile, locally normed).

In addition, from the first quarter/marking period, your DC must have an A in Math, an A in Science and an at or above on-grade reading level.

If meeting all of these conditions (MAP %ile, grades & reading level) your DC is placed in the lottery pool for the magnet.  It's the luck of the draw (late at that point, except that those within the TPMS catchment are placed in a separate pool, which results in their being several times more likely to be offered a spot in the program, given that the 25-seat local set-aside is rather disproportionately high in relation to the in-catchment population when compared with the ~100 non-local-catchment seats.  If not selected for the magnet, students placed in the pool are supposed to be offered PreAlgebra (the more accelerated 6th-grade course) in their home MS.

The Humanities magnet (Eastern/MLK) pool is similar, though with MAP-R (Fall only/no Spring being taken into account), grades in English & Social Studies and reading reported as [i]above[/i]-level (vs  on or above for TPMS/Clemente). I don't think they get the same set-aside as TPMS.  If not selected, local placement in HIGH (supposed to be advanced Social Studies, but several schools moved to a HIGH-for-all model) is supposed to be guaranteed.[/quote]

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