Reply to MAP-M - what's on the test?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]thank you! this is helpful, but only goes to 220 or something. what do difficult questions look like?[/quote]

Are you trying to have your kids study for the MAP? It is not a test you study for. [/quote]

Tell that to the preppers angling for scarce magnet seats...[/quote]

Won't matter anyway for MS Magnets because it's a lottery - it's not like a 99.99%ile makes it more likely you will get in.[/quote]

How do you think those local norms get all skewed?  And then it becomes ever closer to 99th just to get in the lottery pool.  A 1 in 10 chance is better than 0 chance, and preppers clog the field.[/quote]

My kid had 99.999% on their MAP-M and was not picked, whereas their friend with 95% was. Both were in the pool, but it's a lottery.[/quote]

That's the nature of an unweighted lottery -- everyone, once in the same pool, has the same chance.  95th may have been good enough to be at or above the locally normed 85th percentile for your kid's friend's school.  It's not at all surprising that some with lower scores got in and some with higher scores did not.  Whether that's the right thing is another matter.

With an exposure based test like MAP, prepping shifts scores of those doing so to the right.  The locally normed 85th percentile shifts with them.  Where MAP is used as a proxy for ability (a whole other can of worms), a highly able student who does not prep then has a higher chance of being left out of the pool entirely.  Not all highly able students are exposed in class (i.e., absent prep) to the material which would tend to produce a 95th or 96th to 99th percentile score.  Meanwhile, many less highly able students who [i]do prep[/i] achieve in that range.  (I'm not saying they would be of low ability, just less so; also making no specific judgement, here, about your kid or their friend.)

If the magnet is about past exposure/achievement, that might be fine, but it is supposed to be there to address the needs of the highly able, and the content/pace/teaching approach is geared towards those students.

None of that is to say that outside enrichment is bad, in and of itself, or that all those who pursue it are [i]not[/i] among the highly able.  Just that MCPS should be taking a close look at the characteristics of the metric they have chosen, the intent of its use, and the likely dissonant effect.

Side note: while I'm sure you can impute, to a degree, extra decimal places, the percentiles only go up to 99th.  Anything above that is reported as...99th.[/quote]

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