Reply to Why w school students not preferred in Blair magnet

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[quote=Anonymous]"5 standard deviations, that's 1 in a 1.7 million. How many of those can be found amongst the 11,000 MCPS eighth graders (given only 180 should be in the entire US population)? By contrast National Merit Semi finalists are by definition two standard deviations, on the PSAT that's 1/370 (amongst test takers). Now granted doing that by eighth grade is harder but it's not five sigma hard. Why shouldn't I conclude you're a crank? What you say about what teachers know, what students know, the two kind of students admitted to magnets, this is your fiction."

There are lots of ways to classify the distributions of test scores.  Most recognize that scores are more spread out than a standard distribution.  To
start with an example, so we don't spend a lot of time redefining each others terms, consider:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification#/media/File:Terman1916Fig2IQDistribution.png

Those in the my "5th standard deviation" from the mean on this curve would have IQs from 136 to 145.  Yes, I count the standard deviation that includes the mean.

Of the 905 students tested 0.55 percent or 5 students are in the group I am talking about.  Of the 11,000+ 8th graders that would be 61 students.

Of those 61, some don't apply to a magnet at all.  Some only apply to the SMAC and some only to RMIB or Poolsville.  Roughly, these numbers match
the numbers of semifinalists across the county and at Blair.

All I am saying is that this group's applications and how they appear in class is qualitatively different than the 363 who would be in the 126 to 135 
grouping who need to be quantitatively compared to determine which will make the magnet cut.

Did I cherry pick a study that supports my definition of 5th standard deviation, kind of, but that study has been picked MANY times before.  On the other hand,
day in and day out I deal with people in scientific circles that make up both sides of this divide.  The divide is not just present in school or on tests, it is
real and can easily be observed.[/quote]

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