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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There is a huge double standard between sports and academics.  If you put your kid in one AoPS class (total time commitment of 1.75 hrs + 1 hr homework) per week, people clutch their pearls, act as if you're ruining your kid's childhood, and tell you that you're cheating.  If you have your kid in travel sports, no one criticizes you for it.

Also, even if most of us think that putting your kids in cram school is not great parenting, there are people out there who will do exactly that.  [b]We have to accept that those kids might be more advanced than ours[/b], because we can't control other people.  It is what it is, and whining about it won't change anything.  [/quote]

The thing is, many of those kids are not actually more advanced, they’ve essentially been hothoused to appear to be advanced. Many of the kids who have taken extra math classes ahead of their grade level don’t fundamentally understand the extra math they’ve studied but have simply learned to memorize.

Math teachers at TJ have complained about the number of kids who come in who are “advanced” on paper but don’t have the understanding necessary to do truly advanced math courses. 
[/quote]

That wasn't the reason math teachers were complaining. They were complaining because a lot of the kids who were selected in a couple of the years did really badly in math, and needed a lot of extra tutoring to keep up with the cohort.

Turns out, FCPS was trying to increase URM admissions, so they reduced the emphasis on math during the intake, and attempted to "include a wide variety of factors, such as race, ethnicity, gender, English for speakers of other languages (ESOL), geography, poverty, prior school and cultural experiences, and other unique skills and experiences.”.  As a result of this, TJ rejected over one-quarter of the applicants with scores in the top five percent on the [b]AMC 8, a highly competitive national math exam[/b], and rejected more than 100 of the 376 applicants with scores of 47 or higher on the math portion of the admissions test, which has a maximum score of 50. There was a hue and cry over this, and they then course-corrected back to emphasizing math (less than before though).[/quote]

While I agree with you that watering down the content of the admission math test will likely result in selection issues and lead to remediation for some freshmen at TJ, I don't agree with your bolded statement above. The AMC 8 is not a highly competitive exam, even if it's given out nationally. It is nowhere near as high ceiling as the other national math contests such as the AMC 10, AMC 12, HMMT, ARML, and a bunch of others. It is also nowhere near as difficult as the State and National rounds in Mathcounts, (its closest middle school comparison). Hundreds of kids score perfect on the test and many, many more are close to perfect (off by 1 or 2 questions). That also explains the lack of any kind of prizes or next round for the test, other than being fun for exposure to interesting problems.[/quote]

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