Anonymous wrote:In-Pool means that a child is guaranteed to be considered, regardless of a parent’s choosing to submit an application. It is meant to catch kids whose parents don’t know about AAP for whatever reason.
I believe the last audit of the program showed something like 2/3 of the kids in-pool were accepted into AAP. The kids are in-pool because they meet at least one of the basic criteria for admittance, in this case it is the test scores.
That said, a good number of kids are accepted into AAP who are parent referred but the likelihood of acceptance from that group of kids is less then the kids in-pool.
Does it matter? Yes, for the kids whose parents don’t know about AAP, it matters because they will be looked at and could be placed in a more challenging environment. The in-pool kids have a greater chance of being accepted because they have higher test scores. Is it the end all and be all? No.
Not surprising because these testing instrument are suppose to assess who will do well in AAP. But then they say 70% of the
screened kids come from teacher or parent referrals (see link upthread). They don't make it clear if there is overlap between the two groups, but there surely is. Since parents don't know if their kids are in-pool until it's too late to referral, a whole lot of unnecessary referrals are made. Sure, parents might provide additional information not known to the school, but I think a lot of it is superfluous, irrelevant, or just not given as much weight as the school's info, work samples, etc. If we knew the CogAT score, the HOPE "score," and the in-pool designation earlier, we might choose not to "parent refer" as the outcome should be predictable if you have "HOPE" and the test scores. Let the parents who need to rebut the HOPE do the parent referrals and save everyone a lot of work.