Anonymous wrote:So, last year, the CAP class went from 75 to about 100 when they let all the kids in off the waitpool because of a testing problem. That meant 4 sections of CAP classes instead of the traditional 3. Anyone know if they went back down or are keeping the bigger size class
Also, does anyone know definitively what the testing problem was last year? I'll tell you what my kid told me the rumor was -- that kids who only intended to go to CAP and so only had to take the verbal part of the test, signed up for a program where they had to take both verbal and quantitative (e.g. RMIB), but then spent all their time on the verbal portion of the test, in effect getting double the time to do the verbal as compared to kids who were trying to do both sections. My kid who took the test a few years ago told me how the test was structured, and I thought it was crazy because it allowed for just that kind of gamesmanship, so that struck me as a reasonable story about what happened last year. Was the testing this year structured so that you only had a certainly amount of time for each type of test and couldn't work on other parts of the test during that time?
I heard the same, only without the bit about students deliberately signing up for the math test to exploit the loophole. What I heard was simply that statistically last year's CAP applicants who took both tests had much better scores on the reading test compared to those who only took the reading. So much so that it was clear there were people in the waitlist who were only there because they'd taken the test under a different time constraint. Also it was the testing office that flagged the problem and came up with the remedy, not CAP admin.
If they continue with the larger size, they need more teachers. Didn't anyone who applied this year hear how many seats would be available?