Reply to Did the Takoma MS magnet got MORE white this year?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

MCPS's own statistics shows which group has high test scores and which don't.  Apply probability and statistics to the numbers.  If the admittance breakdown to magnets is out of whack with MCPS's own statistics, then that means they are not accepting top performers, and indeed, MCPS has admitted that they look at peer cohort. There is no question about this fact.[/quote]

But that's not true if there truly is a deficit of seats compared to highly qualified students.  If, for example, you have 100 Asian students evaluated and 20 score at whatever your target threshold is (99% or whatever raw score) and you have 100 of some other race evaluated and only 5 score at your SAME target threshold, but you have 10 seats in the program, you can offer those seats to the 5 students of some other race and to 5 of the Asian students and everyone admitted will have met the same threshold for high performance.  There will just be 15 Asian kids who also met the same threshold but didn't get admitted.  And if those 15 all go to the same school, they will hopefully be a peer cohort in class with each other encouraging each other to excel.  Obviously no real life situation is as simple as a stripped-down example, but if there are not enough seats for all of the highly able students (which everyone seems to agree is the case) then it is entirely possible for the student body selected not to mirror the racial percentages of the entire pool (either of MCPS students or of MCPS students who score X on any particular metric) and for each admitted student to still be eminently qualified and not erode the quality of the program at all.  [/quote]
? you just made the argument for me regarding "peer cohort" vs individual performance, and that they are using location as a proxy for race.[/quote]

My example is a MADE UP example with MADE UP numbers that shows that your statement "that means they are not accepting top performers" does not logically follow from the data that you claim exists.  In my example, all of the admitted students ARE top performers.  The fact that not all top performers are admitted does not mean that any non-top performers are admitted if there are more top performers than there are seats.  [/quote]

I think you nailed it, but this will get lost in the garbage spew from the angry poster whose kid didn't make the cut this year.[/quote]
I think people are just not accepting the premise that their target threshold remained as high as it did in years past.  
Lets say that last year their target threshold raw score was 140 but this year it was 132.  Was it lowered to find more students in an underrepresented geographical part of the county?  They really need to release the median raw scores of the accepted kids for this year and years past otherwise people are going to remain suspicious that MCPS lowered admissions standards in order to increase a certain kind of diversity in the magnet programs.
[/quote]

Some people are clearly not accepting the premise that the standards stayed the same but they are doing so based on their own suspicions/biases/opinion, not based on actual data that we have access to.  My point is only that we do not know that any students were admitted with statistically significant lower scores than students who were denied, and that to assume this is what happened based on the race of students admitted is not in fact logically reasoning from the data currently available, but rather making leaps of logic based on prejudice or suspicion of MCPS generally.[/quote]
Some people *clearly* do not understand statistics and probabilities.

If you have a group that normally scores high, then statistically, the median score of that group will be high.

If you widen the group and include many more groups that statistically score lower, then the median score of the whole group will go down.

You can argue that kids aren't a statistic, but the question of whether the median score went down with this new method is a simple matter of math.

I'm just using a bit of math and statistics to reach a conclusion. The naysayers are using emotion, not math or logic.

MCPS can put this question to rest by publishing the test scores of median accepted students like they used to do. Why did they stop doing so?[/quote]

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