They basically give all the kids the same standardized test, then they recalculate everyone’s score based on the relative wealth of the student body. So if you go to a school with very few kids receiving free lunch, your scores generally need to be at or above the 97th percentile or so. They recalculate it every year and don’t publish it but will tell you if you call the AEI office and ask. Kids at high poverty schools can get into the lottery with much much lower scores (percentiles in the 60-70s), but even as low as those scores are, obviously 85 percent of students at those schools score even lower.

Long story short:

-- 5 groups of schools based on FARMS rate

-- Percentile within the grouping

Longer:

If 15% of 5th graders at "Moderately low FARMS" schools across the county score a 5680 or above on the Fall MAP (not a real RIT score -- completely made up just to illustrate without immediately engendering an argument about what that number was/would be), they look up the national norm percentile for 5680. Wherever that national norm percentile begins (say, at 5673), they set as the locally normed 85th percentile cutoff for students in that group. That was the practice in years past, at least.

MCPS has not publicized the locally normed percentiles for a few years. You don't get to know if your DC hit the litmus until the letters come out, unless your DC hit 99th percentile nationally, as that would ensure that even if more than 15% of students in the group had a higher RIT score, the above algorithm would lower the group threshold to where the 99th percentile begins. You can guess based on prior years' experiences -- plenty of fodder in the many other MAP threads, here -- but the groupings and local norms change (or can change) from year to year.

Check the other 100 threads

You need to be in the top 15th percentile of kids in schools with similar FARMs rate. In practice, this means that students from low-poverty schools will need to have better MAP scores to make it into the lottery than students form high-poverty schools. They will let you know after if you make it in. They don't know the cutoffs until they have run the lottery.

Someone told me recently that MAP scores are "locally normed" for eligibility for the middle school humanities and science/math magnets? What does this mean and how do we know what our kid's locally normed MAP score is to even know if they are eligible for the lotteries? Thank you!