Reply to WL IB or TJ or Private

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[quote=Anonymous]The problem for Arlington students is that the new TJ admissions system was designed to correct a situation unique to Fairfax County, but it doesn't work in Arlington with our middle schools being so different demographically and our spots being so limited. In Fairfax, the school board was trying to address the fact that the majority of TJ students were pulling from a small number of middle schools in the Mclean area. They created a system where each school got a number of "allocated" spots (1.5% for each middle school, where the students were only competing against each other within the middle school), and then after that the remaining students went into a common pool where they could compete for "unallocated" spots. When Fairfax gave extra points based on FARMS/ESL/SPED factors, it meant that many of the allocated spots went to students with those factors. But there were still a ton of unallocated spots available to the Fairfax kids. As a result, Carson still sent 47 kids to the freshman class, Longfellow 30, etc.

In APS middle schools, we only get the 1.5% allocated spots (~ 4 per middle school), but the same admissions criteria is applied. So if you have kids applying who are getting a bonus bump for FARMS/ESL/SPED, then it can be very hard to overcome that advantage on the essay points alone. Additionally, in APS, there is not as much opportunity for 8th graders to distinguish themselves on GPA. Fairfax uses a grade scale that includes A-, so the kids who are straight As have a higher GPA weight than the kids with A- averages. As you know, in Arlington, everyone gets an A between 90-100, so all the Arlington kids have the same GPA, even if in reality some kids are getting 90s and other kids are consistently getting 99s and 100s. There is also no advantage to being on the Pre-Alg/Alg 1/Geometry track anymore. (Under the old system, Geometry was a requirement.)

At least for APS, it would be fairer to pool all the Arlington applicants together for evaluation, and then all students would be equally advantaged/disadvantaged by the demographic bonus points. As it is now, the impact hits differently based on how diverse your middle school demographics are and who applies. That's just a fact, regardless of your political thoughts on the subject. 
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