Reply to TJ - admissions: GPA and essays vulnerable to prep and affluence

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Reply to "TJ - admissions: GPA and essays vulnerable to prep and affluence"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Simple and honest question:  Why do so many of you think that GPA and essays are *less* vulnerable to prep and effects of affluence than test scores?  Affluent kids with motivated parents likely have been in enrichment classes for quite awhile and are likely ahead.  If the kid struggles at all, the affluent parents are likely to get a tutor and shore up any deficiencies the kid might have.  If all else fails, the affluent parents are much more likely to badger the teacher and administration until their kid's grade turns into an A.  It honestly doesn't seem hard for any parent with the money and motivation to make sure any average kid could get straight As in middle school.

Likewise, it's pretty easy to talk about love for STEM and such when the kid has been attending enrichment and camps for many years.  Again, it would also be easy to get prep and tutoring to write a highly polished essay.

With tests like PSAT, while prep helps to some degree, there is a pretty strong limit.  Kids who are naturally 99th percentile will likely earn very high scores with no or minimal prep.  Kids who are pretty average but privileged will see score increases, but they're still unlikely to earn super high scores.  It seems easier for affluent parents to ensure that their kids have straight As and can write strong essays than it would be to ensure that their kid would earn a very high PSAT score.

So what am I missing, here?  [/quote]

This appears not to be an issue since the entering classes are economically more diverse than any before the change.[/quote]

There is an explicit preference for FARM students.  Why do we also have to remove merit to achieve the economic diversity?[/quote] Because the fair, objective selection process that other top magnets (Stuy, etc) use to get both highly qualified students who are also economically diverse (an objective test for which prep resources are widely and freely available) is off the table for TJ due to racial reasons.[/quote]
The preference is so important and why is the number of farm students so low?[/quote]
The FARM rate was lower than it needed to be under the old system because the old system included a holistic component.
[b]The kids who tested into the pool had a much higher FARM rate than 2%[/b] but very few poor kids made it through the holistic part of the admissions process.[/quote]

Citation?

The middle schools with lower FRE% generally had a higher % of kids make it into the pool. {b]The % of kids accepted from pool wasn’t generally higher at low FRE% schools. [/b]

[/quote]

Pool to admit rate for class of 2024

Nysmith 90
Willard Intermediate School LCPS 69
Kilmer Middle School 67
Longfellow Middle School 59
Cooper Middle School 57
Jackson Middle School  57
Carson Middle School 57
Frost Middle School 47
Lake Braddock Middle School 47
Lunsford LCPS 44
Rocky Run Middle School 42
Stone Hill LCPS 41

Other schools had too few admits to report.

[/quote]

So you don't actually have the FRE % of kids who tested into the pool?

The data available shows that wealth plays the biggest role for entry into the pool. (and overall admit rate)

[img]https://i.ibb.co/F4t3LrB/wealthimpact.png[/img]

[img]https://i.ibb.co/r0TqnBf/admitsby-MS.png[/img]
(red is best case scenario for TS)

[/quote]

Correlation /= causation

Academic ability is [b]not[/b] evenly spread across the income spectrum.[/quote]

The "academic ability" of kids from wealthier MSs was shaped by parents who wanted their kids to attend TJ and corralled them into relevant tutoring, prep programs, extracurricular activities, etc. 
[/quote]

DP.  We don't like to talk about it anymore but TJ is actually a governor's school for gifted students, i.e., high IQ students.  Usually that correlates with academic achievement, so there's no IQ test for it, only grades and an academic test.

IQ is heritable and also usually correlates with wealth.  Not necessarily UC but generally MC or UMC.  There are outliers but it's not unexpected that most students at a gifted magnet school would not be FARMs.[/quote]

They weren’t looking at IQ. They were evaluating applicants based on things where wealthy kids had an unfair advantage: specialized tests, activities/clubs, etc.

[/quote]

+1
I would be fine if they shifted to some type of IQ test that couldn’t be prepped for. People strategizing their kids’ childhoods for years to get in is what broke the former system. [/quote]

If by broken you mean too many asians and not enough whites.[/quote]

PP mentioned behaviors that many flavors of affluent parents engaged in.

Money bought access. 
[/quote]

If money bought access, then in a county where there are more white kids than asian kids and white families are wealthier than asian families, we would see more white kids.
We do not.

I know some people think it's because white families don't want their kids going to TJ but then how would you explain the fact that TJ was predominantly white before the asians showed up.

At every income level asians outperform others.  Not because of some innate talent but because of effort, unequal effort leads to unequal results.[/quote]

White families are not interested in TJ - they realize that it's a grind and that their kids will reduce their chances of admissions at selective colleges by attending TJ. Eligible white kids apply to TJ at much lower rates and admitted white kids decline to attend at a higher rate than Asian kids.

Also, Asian HHI is higher than white HHI.

Kids from wealthier families have many advantages over kids from lower-income families. Family knowledge and support, tutoring, prep classes, special extracurricular activities, etc.

Wealthy parents tend to know how to game the system and have the means to do so. 
[/quote]

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