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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How does MCPS conduct the lottery? Do they pick names out of a bowl? [/quote]

Biggest fish bowl you've ever seen. 12,000 little pieces of paper folded up in there. And they only give the divers five minutes of air in their tanks.[/quote]

On a serious note, how do they conduct lottery and how do we know it is a fair process. Randomization is important and results can easily be biased if the process is not fair.[/quote]

I've never seen anything about how the lottery process is conducted. Why do you assume it is a random lottery? They've never stated it is a random lottery. My guess is that it is a weighted lottery.[/quote]

I've always assumed it was weighted but there's no way to prove it, of course. Just as we can't ensure the process is fair to all. If your child is in the lottery pool, take comfort in knowing that they're going to be fine regardless of outcome. They're one of the lucky ones, whether by gift of native intelligence, familial resources, or combination therein.
[/quote]

The weighting only happens to be *in* the lottery:

IEP, 504, FARMS, ESOL get some weighting, but they've never disclosed the extent/algorithm.

Lower-performing schools get weighted, in effect, via local norming of the MAP %ile cutoff.  Local norming in MCPS has been described as tranched -- 3 or 4 groupings of schools -- so a student's raw score is compared only to others coming from that tranche of similarly- performing schools when figuring the %ile.  This is intended to correct for things like not having a peer group to allow teachers to push the envelope on content covered and the like, since MAP is a measure of what has been learned (vs. innate ability, which is more that at which CogAT aims), and kids can't really learn what they havent seen.

MCPS has said that once in the lottery, everyone has the same chance (unweighted).[/quote]

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