Reply to When will Walls interview notices come out??

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No dog in this fight but such a dumb system.

1) in DCPS, you can get B+, A-, A-, and A in each quarter and still get an A.  If you do this for every class, you get a 4.0 for Walls admission.  A student getting the identical grades at a school using a 100-point scale could get a 90 for every class, which counts as a 3.7 for Walls admission.  In other words, students getting identical grades at two different schools receive different GPAs for Walls admissions.

2) Walls doesn’t weight the grades, so an A in PE at a failing school counts more than an A- in Algebra 2 at a rigorous school.  With rampant grade inflation and social promotion at all DCPS schools, any average DCPS student can be a 4.0.

3)  Anyone in the Walls pool of 500 still has to interview with a current student and teacher.  That interview counts for 31/36 points.  Last year, some interviews were just a few minutes and non-substantive.  Reportedly, many average kids were admitted, and significant number were particularly attractive.  No one really knows why this short interview counts as over 86% of your overall score.

4) The remaining possible 5 points come from GPA.  Most kids in the pool of 500 will be 3.8 or higher, so they get the obligatory 5 points; those at 3.79 and below only get 4 points.  This just reinforces the bias noted in point one above.
  
Overall, this is a ridiculous way to select a magnet school class.  DC should follow the lead of NYC, which reinstituted an exam for magnet schools after the pandemic and schools’ ability to prioritize top-performing students using fairer, more objective criteria.

Not surprisingly, the average SAT score at NYC’s top magnet high school is 1510; the average SAT score at Walls is 1275.[/quote]

Excellent post, PP.   Signed - Stuyvesant grad who's glad the SSHAT admissions test in back in force in NY, along with free city-wide test prep for it at special centers open to all in all 5 boroughs[/quote]

Lowell in SF also brought back the admission test [/quote]

Yes, after SF East and South Asian-American pressure groups got organized and fought back on the political level, after several years of concerted campaigning.  With East and South Asian-American participation in DCPS at around 1% at the middle school level, we're not....getting the Walls test back.[/quote]

Not sure it would have to be Asians, but I agree that change would require someone to do more than grumble anonymously online. [/quote]

Politically, it's much harder for white to challenge than minorities.  The white dad who sued Boston Latin for failing to admit his 6th grade daughter after she'd scored higher on the the entrance exam than many URMs who were admitted was persona non grata in the city for a long time.  The case settled in the early 2000s once Boston Public agreed to create a race-blind admissions system.[/quote]

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