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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why is a “magnet” schools which was previously accepted as a top school when academics (courses, essay, gpa, testing, etc.) was the only criteria when now the criteria includes points for experiential factors having absolutely no bearing on academic ability? Anyone who says TJ is as good as always is blind to what everyone else sees.  [/quote]

Well, that's not exactly accurate. Previously the only criteria was whether you could buy the test answers. These days it's at least based on merit.[/quote]

Merit? Please define experiential factors. [/quote]

Still seems better than memorizing test answers purchased from a prep center.[/quote]
which prep center is selling test answers? Name it!  :mrgreen: [/quote]

I'm not the PP, but IIRC, the TJ students were openly talking about it on a FB page a few years ago. 
[/quote]

Curie did not "sell test answers". They charged about $5K for their flagship TJ prep course, a significant feature of which was preparation for the "Quant-Q" exam. The Quant-Q is a secured exam whose purpose is to evaluate students' native problem-solving abilities by confronting them with[i] problems of types they've never seen before[/i] (this is critical) and challenging them to solve those problems at relatively high speed.

The vast majority of Quant-Q problems are not especially difficult, but they can be tedious and time consuming if your mind doesn't naturally progress towards creating a simpler solution. I know this because I've seen multiple forms of it in different circumstances not relative to TJ admissions, and every time I saw it I was required to sign a statement indicating that I would not discuss any specifics or problem types with anyone.

The moment that a student learns how to solve one of the types of problems that is found on the Quant-Q from someone else, [b]the exam becomes not only pointless, but obscurative to the goal of selecting students for programs.[/b] The entire point of the exam is to test the student's ability to come up with a method of solving the problem quickly on their own.

TJ students in the Classes of 2023 and 2024 openly reported on a Facebook Page called TJ Vents (first anonymously, and then confirmed by named students) that when they sat for the Quant-Q, there were a few problems on it that they'd seen [i]word for word[/i] in their time at Curie. Given the length and complexity of most of the problems on the exam, it is obvious that somehow the folks at Curie got a hold of those problems when they weren't supposed to. Some individual - almost certainly their students who took the exam to get into TJ and then reported back - had memorized the problems, allowing Curie to both place those problems in their own question bank [b]and to develop strategies to teach the students for how to solve them[/b].

Given that, because Curie published the first and last names of its students who were admitted to TJ (as well as AOS and AET) we know that they essentially exclusively serve Northern Virginia's South Asian community, it's instructive to look at the data for Asian admit percentages over four of the years in question alongside the success of Curie students in gaining admission to TJ.

Class of 2021: 74.9% Asian, Curie not available (the last year of the SHSAT process)
Class of 2022: 65.2% Asian, Curie 50 TJ admits (the first year of the Quant-Q)
Class of 2023: 72.1% Asian, Curie 95 TJ admits
Class of 2024: 73.2% Asian, Curie 133 TJ admits (the last year of the Quant-Q)

Re: the kids who were admitted in this manner for 2023 and 2024 - it's not their fault that their parents signed them up and paid for a boutique service that afforded them access to some of the answers and, likely, all of the question types on the exam that was the primary separator for the admissions process. But the bottom line is that they did have that access.

It's also worth noting that simply the introduction of a new suite of exams to the TJ admissions process had almost exactly as great an impact on the raw number of Asian TJ admits (367 in '21 and 316 in '22, -51) than did the implementation of the new admissions process (355 in '24 and 299 in '25, -56). But there was no broad outcry about a racist change to the process because the Asian community knew that it would just be a matter of time before things would be back to normal through the nine-figure TJ prep industrial complex.[/quote]

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