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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]More inclusive means, "We lower our standards so as to appease the Diversity gestapo.  Mediocrity over Merit!" [/quote]

I think it reflects an overall crackdown on school admissions 'cheating'. Cheating is not merit.[/quote]

There is no cheating scandal.  FCPS has not raised this once in either lawsuit when defending the admission changes.  This is just sour grapes and cognitive dissonance from parents whose snowflakes didn't do well enough on the admissions test to get to the semifinals.  [/quote]

"Cheating" is a poor word for what has been established to have happened. What happened is that FCPS realized that an exam that was supposed to be secured was not in fact secured and that certain prep companies skirted the rules in order to gain an advantage for their students.

It's appropriate to call it a "pay for play" scandal - it's not appropriate to call it a cheating scandal. [/quote]

I agree. Why isn't FCPS at fault for this? Why isn't anyone holding them accountable for the leaked exam which resulted in this mess?[/quote]

Because they're not the ones who leaked questions from previous exams and brought them back to the prep companies in order to build a question bank. The students who took the exam in the class of 2022 and 2023 did this, but there's no way of knowing who.

The Quant-Q had a significant impact on the racial demographics in the Class of 2022, but that blip re-balanced itself once the prep companies caught up in the following years.[/quote]

Isn't impossible to prevent leaking questions from past years? Isn't this exactly the same issue as the SAT or AP exams, or any other test? Prep companies always have some level of access to topics and questions from the past. Why wouldn't FCPS make all past tests available to every school, I would imagine that would be the equitable way of making sure every student is aware of the materials.[/quote]

Because the owners/creators of the Quant-Q disallow them from doing so.

Anyone who uses the Quant-Q is contractually obligated to sign an NDA barring them from discussing it or sharing any materials from it, because the entire point of it is to see how good people are at coming up with out-of-the-box solutions to complex problems on the fly.

If a prep company shows students those solutions to the types of problems that are on the exam year-over-year - [b]even if they're not the same problems - that completely negates the point of what is otherwise a VERY good exam.[/b][/quote]

Any exam that remains secretive after the fact, is definitely NOT a very good exam. Even if the exam is good, the practice is completely unethical because it widens the prepping gap, making it very inequitable for minorities to catch up.

FCPS is at fault here for not taking control of the testing process and relying on a outside unethical company to do so. Why did they hire a someone who produces a secretive test? It clearly plays right into the hands of prepping. Let's be real, prepping is just paying for access to information. This becomes highly inequitable to underrepresented groups who cannot afford the same classes, and are thus [b]completely [/b]locked out of studying for the exam. FCPS should have done the opposite, do their own testing every year, and publish the tests for all to access, and recommend to all schools that every student interested in applying should study the material. [/quote]

You make a lot of good points here. I think the purpose of using the Quant-Q was the fact that it was supposed to be "unpreppable" - which clearly was not the case.

What would work, I think, would be to have an exam that establishes a baseline level of competency to succeed at TJ, use that to create a pool of "semifinalists", and then throw the exam scores out. That's not what happened in the previous admissions process, as the exams were essentially graded on a curve to where artificial inflation of scores would have an impact on other students' ability to qualify - and then those scores were very clearly used to create separation within the semifinalist pool (as proven by comparing the exam performance of students offered versus the semifinalist pool in total).[/quote]

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