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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The best are Langley, McLean, Madison pyramids

Marshall is recently almost mediocre but fell again so I wouldn't count on it[/quote]
Fell how? You mean with GS’s new system that doesn’t take it into account it’s a IB school?[/quote]

That, and penalizes diversity.

For crying out, people, if you want to really understand the quality of the school, stop looking on anonymous boards, or at least apply some critical thinking to what metrics to pay attention to (hint: not SAT scores, or dubious rankings that have obscure methodologies with hidden biases). But if you are looking for richest/whitest/most Asian, by all means come here and listen to the advice.[/quote]

An interesting article:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/no-one-likes-the-sat-its-still-the-fairest-thing-about-admissions/2019/03/22/5fa67a16-4c00-11e9-b79a-961983b7e0cd_story.html?utm_term=.a47684513d02

Some posters are more than happy to equate any measure of academic aptitude or achievement with socio-economics, or tar them with labels like "dubious," "obscure"  and "biased."  They rarely, if ever, offer a meaningful alternative, which suggests that they simply oppose any attempts to measure aptitude or achievement altogether.  [/quote]

Happy to offer you alternatives, a bit short on time though:

Best: Predicted performance by school vs actual performance, controlling for demographic and SE factors. "Performance" can be anything that the school impacts: SOL pass rates, participation/results on advanced exams (AP and IB). To my knowledge, there was only one such study years back, I don't have a link to it.

Next best: Look at SOL scores by race/SES status, and specifically the magnitude of difference between the advantaged and disadvantaged populations - that will tell you how well the school serves its core mission - to educate its full population. Then look at the participation rate for advanced classes (AP/IB) (e.g. # classes taken/eligible students), and the success rate overall and for each subject (#pass with grade 3+/#tests taken) - this information is not available by race/SES, but even without it, this will tell you how the school serves its advanced population. You want both metrics to be high. If participation is high, but pass rate is low, the school is either not effective at teaching advanced curriculum, or it advises students inappropriately (e.g. pushes students into classes that are too advanced for them.) Low participation is generally reflective of lower SES, so it is useful to look at this metric against some SES/racial profile for the schools you are comparing.

Generally, companies that are interested in mass marketing "indices" (hello, Great Schools) don't want to bother with appropriate treatment of the data to ensure comparability of their results (e.g. not including IB metrics because it is very inconvenient to have to deal with multiple data sources.) Like I said, if someone is interested in understanding school quality (i.e. how the school would affect the outcomes of a given kid), they should go a little deeper.[/quote]

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