Reply to How common is a math or reading MAP score at the 99th percentile in this area?

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "How common is a math or reading MAP score at the 99th percentile in this area?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Reading this you might get depressed.  I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year  They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility. [/quote]

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.[/quote]

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace. [/quote]

That's odd because I thought the information posted on the MCCPTA group obtained through FOIA stated 95% or higher was the cutoff for a low-farms school.[/quote]

np When did MCPS start lowering the admissions standards for kids from higher FARMS schools? Does this apply for all magnet programs in middle and high school too?[/quote]

That happened in at least two separate approaches.

The first was a change several years back to identify whether there were local cohorts of high-ability students whose needs could be addressed together at the local school, instead of at the magnet, which would then only take real outliers from the high-performing (usually lower-FARMS) schools, leaving more room at magnets for students fron higher-FARMS schools who might not score as high as those kept with their local cohort at a low-FARMS school, but who were local outliers, themselves (no manageably large cohort to allow their needs to be addressed locally).  That still called on something of a rank-ordering, with the different lens just noted, and offering seats to the highest on the list first.

That was abandoned with the pandemic, where they had little confidence in the measures they would have used to rank-order students.  They then cast a wide net to identify those who [i]might[/i] benefit from a magnet, including the local norming by FARMS-rate tranche, conducting a lottery among any who were identified.  That net tightened the second year, but the local norming and lottery (vs. rank-ordering) was maintained.

This applied to elementary and middle school criteria-based magnet programs.  High school magnet program admissions has seen adjustment (e.g., discontinuation of teacher recommendations, etc.), but is still more or less a rank-ordered process, rather than a lottery.  ES & MS local-school programming -- ELC, Compacted Math (though less directly related), HIGH and AIM (now largely shifting to AMP 7+) -- has been increased, though variably well implemented and not seen to be true magnet-experience equivalents, to address those left out by the lottery process.  Most of the presentations to the BOE on the matter have focused on the demographic distributions of those offered/accepting seats.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics