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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
What I have learned in many years of experience in Northern Virginia and TJ is this:

If you have a hard and fast selection criteria that you use and apply equally to all students - basically no matter what it is - the system will favor the parents who have the resources and motivation to fit their round kid into the square hole. And you’re going to get a huge number of kids who all have relatively the same profile because the parents figured out that “that’s the profile that works”.

No matter what racial balance that creates, it’s a negative outcome for TJ. Too many similar kids results in mental health issues.[/quote]

What everyone (mostly everyone) wants is a return to the best years of TJ, to the good old days when gifted students had rigorous but not crushing classes, a peer group of innovative students, and lower pressure.  The 80s and 90s, maybe?

So far, no one has any  idea how to recreate that.  But I think a change is a step in the right direction.[/quote]

To recreate that, you'd need to return to a time when a good but not great TJ student could count on UVA as a fall back and VT as a safety. Any school comprised of kids all wanting to go to competitive colleges is going to have pressure because those kids know they have to outperform their peers to make it happen [/quote]

This is absolutely FALSE. TJ students have struggled in the college admissions process in recent years not because of the increased level of competitiveness, but because they tend to be indistinguishable from one another on paper. They are all going for the same seats at the same schools, rather than going for different seats at the same schools. So say college admissions officers who visit the school, at any rate.

Bring in a class of students with a greater diversity of experiences, interests, and goals, and you’ll see stronger admit numbers from TJ.[/quote]

TJ students know that if they want to go on to the kind of colleges that they expect to go on to, they will needs to be at least as good as their peers. That leads to a high pressure atmosphere. It's no different from any magnet or private school where the student body all want to go the the same type of college and all know that they will be compared against each other. [/quote]

So, one of the things that you learn when you've been around TJ long enough is that a prominent student strategy for getting into elite colleges is to check out the resume/profile of TJ kids who have gotten in to the school they want and do whatever they can to mirror it. They use this strategy because it worked to get them into TJ - because of the problematic admissions process that evaluated every student by the same metrics.

It's a well-known fact at TJ that if you announce that you got into Stanford, you can expect 300-400 Facebook friends requests the next day.

But that strategy doesn't work to get into elite colleges because they're enlightened enough not to seek the exact same profile of kid for every seat. This is why they end up complaining to TJ's Student Services department that they get tons of resumes from TJ kids that all look exactly the same.[/quote]

This.

You know all of those fake and lame non-profits started by TJ students?  There was a kid in the class of 2017 (maybe 2016?) that got into Harvard with middle of the road grades for TJ.  He talked up starting a non-profit as a golden ticket.  It caught on and actually worked for a few years.  It didn’t work as well for the latest TJ class and that’s why you are seeing fewer fake non-profits crop up.  [/quote]

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