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

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[quote=Anonymous][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]

It has changed each year based on the then-calculated local norm for each FARMS rate tranche.  That is, if the top 15% of scorers from low-FARMS-categorized schools hit the 98th %ile vs. 2020 norms, then a student at one of those schools scoring in the 97th %ile will not qualify for the lottery.  If MAP performance at these schools gets bunched towards the very top, say, because of high levels of exposure to above-grade-level material, small, natural variations in a student's score can become meaningful in lottery qualification even if not particularly meaningful as an assessment of ability (e.g., the low meaning attributed to differences between 97th & 99th, as pointed out earlier).

MCCPTA got info from MCPS two years ago and made that available.  MCPS didn't follow up with the same detailed data this past year, though they had mentioned the cutoffs had shifted higher, and I don't think MCCPTA asked.  Part of that may have been because MCPS's answers to pointed MCCPTA questions about the prior-year data were obtuse, if provided at all, and suggestions put forth by MCCPTA/community members were roundly ignored; that basically exhausted anyone advocating for change, whether with a different approach or with a minor adjustment.[/quote]

Do you have any tangible evidence that it was changed from the data which was shared by MCCPTA just last year?[/quote]

Aside from their having said so to me when I asked, and to others, presumably?  Only the anecdotal evidence of knowing scores of several kids who did not make the cutoff last year, but would have (met all the other requirements) if the national %ile litmus  had stayed the same.

Again, I don't think they made the numbers publicly known for last year.  The MCCPTA request had occurred in 21-22, and the back-and-forth of requesting clarification that I noted occurred through last fall, at least  The numbers MCPS gave definitely weren't for the 22-23 evaluations (which would have been Fall '22 MAPs for criteria-based MS magnets & Winter '23 MAP-R for CES).  Maybe someone has a link to something I haven't seen, though.

The way you ask ("tangible evidence") makes me think you don't believe what I put out there, but I don't really have a reason to misrepresent anything.  Happy to know different if you have or someone else has a link showing that the 85th %ile local norms by FARMS-rate tranche [i]didn't[/i] change from the one year to the next.[/quote]

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