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[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]

MS is very different then HS. My kid has a 4.0, probably higher since he has A1H and Geometry, in AAP classes. He has been took a foreign language in 7th and 8th grade. That is 2 HS classes. He has not struggled but has had to study for the language. We have had to have a few conversations about answering completely after we noticed some B's on assignments in LA, Science, and Social Studies. He knew the material but was being lazy in how he answered. But how will he handle 5 HS level classes? How will he handle 5 HS level classes at a school were everyone is scoring in the 99th percentile? MS to HS is a huge transition and the jump is harder for TJ because the expectations are that they are teaching to kids who learn and absorb information quickly.

I think he will be fine, he is a smart kid and we have specifically challenged him with enrichment in areas to encourage developing study skills and to make sure he has been challenged. That is part of the reason he is doing a foreign language, it is more challenging for him. But I am not going to pretend that the work in HS isn't going to be more and that he has not been faced with too many classes where he needs to complete homework at home or study much for. [/quote]

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