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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Aren't GPA's just cutoffs and are not considered in final selection?[/quote]

I haven’t seen anything to this effect in writing. There is SPS but also quotas per school.[/quote]

It is not a quota, there are seats set aside for every MS. Some of the MS don’t have enough applicants to fill those seats nd the empty seats go into the general pool. [b]Some schools will end up with far more then the 1.5% guarantee.[/b] [/quote]

Correct.

TJ parent here (and I’m not here to debate).

The 1.5% set-aside for each middle school had the intended effect of TJ making offers to every MS in FCPS, while also reducing the total number of offers to the traditional 3 or 4 MS who, prior to the change, accounted for up to twice as many offers.

For example, Longfellow MS in McLean used to send approximately 80 students to TJ each year.

Due to the 1.5 cap, Longfellow offers have fallen to 30 to 40 each year.[/quote]

About 60-70% of 500 students came from about 30-40% of 26 middle schools.

I'm here for the debate because everyone that supports this admissions process is more interested in virtue signalling than helping anyone.

Several middle schools frequently sent zero students.  Those schools were now had 7-9 spots reserved and frequently had trouble filling those spots.
Any eligible student applying from these schools were virtually guaranteed admission.
This led to a high number of freshman failures to launch.

The old principal actively tried to keep kids from returning to their base school.  The new principal just send them back if they cannot maintain a 3.0, which leads to a purge at the end of freshman year.
After the purge at the end of freshman year, a lot of those severely underrepresented middle schools go back to being severely underrepresented and the froshmores tend to come from the usual suspects.

The kids that were sent back were probably kids that never belonged there to begin with.  Their high school career has been negatively impacted by going to Tj and if we had an entrance exam, we would have known that they were not qualified but perhaps some other kid at their school might be.

Bonitatibus just wouldn't give up on her fiction.  She assumed that every failing kid at TJ could be successful with enough scaffolding and that simply isn't true.  Most kids don't have the horsepower to get up that hill with all the scaffolding in the world.  [b]And some of them stuck it out at TJ for 4 years with a sub 3.0 GPA and are going to schools like NOVA and Radford.  If they had stayed at their base school, they could have gone to VT or WM or UVA.[/quote][/b]

So this is something I don’t quite understand. These kids applied with an over 3.5 GPA but can’t keep up at HS. Is the TJ curriculum more difficult than what the state mandates at other FCPS high schools? Or is it because they are graded on a curve?[/quote]

Current freshman mom here, my son came from a traditional “feeder”, all As, AAP/Algebra II honors in 8th and he seriously struggled the first grading period due to a lack of knowing how to study. He’s turned it around and has all As/A-s and one B+ (the retake isn’t until the next grading period, but that grade should go up to an A-).

A 3.5 GPA in 7th grade taking honors 7th grade math and 3 other honors courses (unless young scholars, then only 2 other honors courses are required) is fairly easy with the FCPS retake policy. A lot of students start struggling with Honors Algebra I in 8th grade. TJ admits based on 7th grade and 8th grade first quarter grades. An admitted student could end up with a C or D in Algebra I in 8th by the end of the year and TJ wouldn’t know or rescind their admittance. A 3.5 would be half As and half Bs in middle school, not super impressive.

If FCPS cared about TJ being a good fit for students they would at least require their GPA at the end of 8th grade to stay a 3.5 or better and require pass advanced for the math SOL. Even 3.5 is too low, they should really raise the GPA to 3.75 or higher.[/quote]

And that's a kid from Carson.  A kid from Poe is just going to drown unless they are a natural.[/quote]

NP and a TJ parent of a sophomore.  I sadly agree with PP.

Is your 8th grader truly ready for the rigor of TJ?

Here is something to give you, as a parent, a glimpse of the rigor TJ demands:  last year, in freshman English, students were assigned this article (other TJ parents will likely recognize it):

https://journals.indexcopernicus.com/api/file/viewByFileId/758634

That article is not a normal reading assignment for most HS freshmen, but it’s not unusual for TJ.

TJ is ranked among the top 5 high schools in the U.S. for ample and good reason:  it is very demanding.[/quote]

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