For application schools, the lottery has nothing to do with the admissions rubric. The school will make a decision about whether or not it wants to admit your kid purely based on the rubric. For these schools the “lottery” is only relevant when it comes to the order in which you ranked schools. If you ranked SWW #1 on and Banneker #2, and SWW waitlists your kid but Banneker accepts them, they’ll have an offer at Banneker and remain on the WL for SWW. But if SWW accepts your kid from the start, you’ll never know the outcome of the Banneker application, because you ranked SWW higher.

If you listed any schools that are NOT application schools, like MacArthur, admission will depend on your lottery number and where you ranked the school on your list.

I think the lottery determines the order of all the kids with the exact same score. So it only matters at the threshold scores.

The link to the rubric was really helpful - I'd not seen that before, thank you. It's still odd though that I see nowhere where the 'lottery' portion of this comes into play. Given the sheer number of applications they receive, do the pass a lottery round first? If they don't, it would only be based on merit, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening?

Anonymous wrote:Straight A, 8th grader in Geometry didn't get called for SWW. Shes puzzled. Onward

Samesies! 4.0, geometry. Thought working relationships with recommending teachers were terrific. Apparently mistaken!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teacher recs count for far more than GPA and they aren't standardized. one teacher can give everyone 5/5 and the next teacher can give no one 5/5. They're totally subjective.

GPA is just a tiny bit of what they take into account and it's weighed so that a 3.5 is the same as a 4.0. There's no benefit to having all As vs having half Bs.

Here is this year’s rubric. https://www.myschooldc.org/sites/default/files/dc/sites/myschooldc/page/attachments/SY24-25%20SWW_Admission%20Process%20Rubric_Final.pdf

They have changed the GPA weighting so it’s more nuanced than PP describes (4.0 gets more points than even 3.8 this year), but it’s still true that teacher recommendations count for more than GPA. If a 4.0 kid didn’t get an interview it’s almost certainly because the recommendation scores weren’t high enough relative to other applicants.

A few notes:

As I read the rubric, the school establishes a threshold GPA (last year, it was around 3.7) and then invites kids who are over that threshold GPA to interview based entirely on their teacher rec scores. I'm fairly certain they did not send out "you were not selected" emails this year because of how mad/responsive people who received those emails were last year.

The GPA is worth 10 total points in the process. Anything 3.9 or above gets the full 10 points. 3.8-3.89 gets 8 points.

Teacher recs are worth 30 points. Students and teachers have no idea how they are scored or what questions/categories "count" for points.

Some amorphous combination of the interview and writing sample is worth 60 points, for those kids who are selected to interview.

Overall, this rubric is way worse than any I've seen for any academic assignment in my kids' years of school. We hold individual teachers to a higher standard of clarity and transparency than this entire admission process.

(And as an aside, the parent portion of the interview is supposed to have NO WEIGHT in the decision-making.)

Each applicant gets a score for their interview, which is added to the score for GPA and teacher recs (see rubric someone posted above). Kids are ordered by total score and offers are made in that order. So the WL is ordered by how kids scored overall.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For the selective schools with interviews, do they do the lottery first for qualified kids, then select for interviews and pick who they like best from there? Or just take the top applicants, then do the lottery after the interviews? Asking since it seems that some kids with perfect GPAs didn't get called, some with lesser did etc.

Also, is there a third wave of interviews or is this it for Banneker?

I am also confused. I thought they pick those qualified from all the applicants and invite them for an interview. From there, pick the top candidates and put their names in the lottery. However, when I asked the interviewer yesterday he said no lottery after the interview. My DD’s friend who also has great grades did not get called for an interview but somebody who has a lower gpa got called. We are perplexed.

Well, Banneker required an essay so maybe they never got called to the interview because of the essay or maybe teacher recommendations or both?

Anonymous wrote:Teacher recs count for far more than GPA and they aren't standardized. one teacher can give everyone 5/5 and the next teacher can give no one 5/5. They're totally subjective.

GPA is just a tiny bit of what they take into account and it's weighed so that a 3.5 is the same as a 4.0. There's no benefit to having all As vs having half Bs.

Here is this year’s rubric. https://www.myschooldc.org/sites/default/files/dc/sites/myschooldc/page/attachments/SY24-25%20SWW_Admission%20Process%20Rubric_Final.pdf

They have changed the GPA weighting so it’s more nuanced than PP describes (4.0 gets more points than even 3.8 this year), but it’s still true that teacher recommendations count for more than GPA. If a 4.0 kid didn’t get an interview it’s almost certainly because the recommendation scores weren’t high enough relative to other applicants.

Teacher recs count for far more than GPA and they aren't standardized. one teacher can give everyone 5/5 and the next teacher can give no one 5/5. They're totally subjective.

GPA is just a tiny bit of what they take into account and it's weighed so that a 3.5 is the same as a 4.0. There's no benefit to having all As vs having half Bs.

Anonymous wrote:Straight A, 8th grader in Geometry didn't get called for SWW. Shes puzzled. Onward

NP and I am sorry for this. I do think kids with straight As should move to the interview no matter what. I think parents need to push back on this through DCPS but I recognize that the parents who this affects have to find other schools for their rising ninth graders so don’t have the time to make this a concern.

Who gets called for interviews seems random, but it’s not because of the lottery. It’s because teacher recommendations are not standardized in any way. And teacher recommendations now count for way, way more than GPA.

Anonymous wrote:For the selective schools with interviews, do they do the lottery first for qualified kids, then select for interviews and pick who they like best from there? Or just take the top applicants, then do the lottery after the interviews? Asking since it seems that some kids with perfect GPAs didn't get called, some with lesser did etc.

Also, is there a third wave of interviews or is this it for Banneker?

I am also confused. I thought they pick those qualified from all the applicants and invite them for an interview. From there, pick the top candidates and put their names in the lottery. However, when I asked the interviewer yesterday he said no lottery after the interview. My DD’s friend who also has great grades did not get called for an interview but somebody who has a lower gpa got called. We are perplexed.

Anonymous wrote:Straight A, 8th grader in Geometry didn't get called for SWW. Shes puzzled. Onward

Sorry to hear that. Many of us have been there. Rest assured that there are other good spots out there and we ended up in a good school that worked for our family.

Straight A, 8th grader in Geometry didn't get called for SWW. Shes puzzled. Onward

For the selective schools with interviews, do they do the lottery first for qualified kids, then select for interviews and pick who they like best from there? Or just take the top applicants, then do the lottery after the interviews? Asking since it seems that some kids with perfect GPAs didn't get called, some with lesser did etc.

Also, is there a third wave of interviews or is this it for Banneker?