Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Np here. Doesn’t that seem crazy though? How can a 99th percentile kid not get into an advanced program? Sorry, not trying to stir the pot at all. I have my kids in catholic elementary. Part of our decision process was that I didn’t really care for how early the AAP program starts in FCPS. It just seems like a very young age to parse these things out.

Why? It is because 99% kids in this area are a dime a dozen. It's the same reason the top colleges reject plenty of students with perfect test scores and stellar grades. They want to give everyone a chance and so they reject some perfect students to make room for more diversity.

They're really not, though. 99th percentile kids are still at least the 96th percentile locally for a program that takes over 20%. There's no need to reject 99th percentile kids to make more room for diversity. The most plausible explanation is that the selection committee is highly aware of the test prepping and are rejecting kids with 99th percentile scores that they don't think are valid.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Np here. Doesn’t that seem crazy though? How can a 99th percentile kid not get into an advanced program? Sorry, not trying to stir the pot at all. I have my kids in catholic elementary. Part of our decision process was that I didn’t really care for how early the AAP program starts in FCPS. It just seems like a very young age to parse these things out.

Why? It is because 99% kids in this area are a dime a dozen. It's the same reason the top colleges reject plenty of students with perfect test scores and stellar grades. They want to give everyone a chance and so they reject some perfect students to make room for more diversity.

Anonymous wrote:Np here. Doesn’t that seem crazy though? How can a 99th percentile kid not get into an advanced program? Sorry, not trying to stir the pot at all. I have my kids in catholic elementary. Part of our decision process was that I didn’t really care for how early the AAP program starts in FCPS. It just seems like a very young age to parse these things out.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I meant that we don't know what the committee is doing, what their criteria is, what their goals are.

On this forum, there's a lot of energy spent examining who got in and who didn't to determine the rule. I think that's a foolish endeavor.

PP here, and I agree with you. The process is holistic, and trying to analyze just the scores is foolish. We have no real way to compare work samples, teacher comments, and everything else that goes into the packet, nor are we privy to the criteria and goals of the program. Most of the kids who belong in AAP but got rejected this time will either get in on appeals or get in next year.

That being said, I think failing to submit any work samples, the questionnaire, or other optional forms was a huge mistake that led to some of those 99th percentile rejections.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
If the work samples are the most important part of the file, they should let people know and make them mandatory. .

The samples submitted by the school are important, and it's already mandatory for the school to supply two of them. Some teachers are better than others at selecting good work samples. My theory is that if your child has sloppy handwriting or is a poor speller, this will strongly work against your child for AAP selection, even though neither handwriting nor spelling ability are very correlated with intelligence.

My observation too. It seems that the slightly above average kids that are really hard working and organized have a clear advantage in getting in. If you are a sloppy genius, it's not guaranteed.

Anonymous wrote:
I meant that we don't know what the committee is doing, what their criteria is, what their goals are.

On this forum, there's a lot of energy spent examining who got in and who didn't to determine the rule. I think that's a foolish endeavor.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I don't think this is correct. I think the committee knows what they are doing and we don't.

You have a lot of faith in a very arbitrary process. Let me guess: your child was borderline and got in, so you want to think the committee saw something special in your child? Of course you find the idea more palatable that the committee are experts and "knew" that your child was gifted, rather than that your child lucked out from the arbitrariness of the process.

Based on the kids I've worked with in AAP, I'm pretty sure that the committee has no clue what it's doing. Also, the AART at my school who has been part of the process for over 20 years doesn't seem to think the committee knows what it's doing.

Just to give an example, my child's 5th grade AAP math teacher has ecart configured such that for every test, you can see the number of kids who got each problem wrong. There are a lot of kids in that class who don't understand the math and clearly need a slower paced math class. The problems are pretty basic, and they're still getting a lot of them wrong. The committee, in all of their wisdom, placed these kids into a program in which the math is moving too fast for them, and as a result, these kids will have very poor foundations for all future math. Likewise, in the 6th grade AAP classrooms, half of the kids not only didn't pass the IAAT, but they weren't even close to the cutoff.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s not a gifted program anymore.

Teacher remarks should have the most weight. Is the child advanced? Hard working? Curious? Bright? That is the child for AAP.

That's ridiculous, though. My child's 2nd grade teacher didn't like him because he's not a people pleaser and wasn't compliant with the mounds of busy work they were given, like coloring sheets, word searches, and the like. DS was in the outlier math, reading, and word study groups (like, top 2-3 kids in the grade), with his teachers in those glowing about how advanced and brilliant he is. DS was reading long chapter books in 1st grade. DS also had all test scores above 140. The 2nd grade teacher gave a GBRS of 11, with only a 1 in Motivation to Succeed. Most of the comments were pretty lame, and he was dinged for preferring to engage with adults rather than other kids and for being disorganized. Yes, the teacher put negative comments in the GBRS, even though all comments are supposed to be positive. He still was admitted to AAP.

In AAP, he's the kid winning all of the contests, acing all of the tests, and to some extent making the other AAP kids in his class feel dumb. My other AAP child, who is a bright, hardworking, non-gifted people-pleaser, got a 16 GBRS. The GBRS is much more reflective of the teacher's biases than the kid's actual ability.

Anonymous wrote:
I don't think this is correct. I think the committee knows what they are doing and we don't.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
If the work samples are the most important part of the file, they should let people know and make them mandatory. .

The samples submitted by the school are important, and it's already mandatory for the school to supply two of them. Some teachers are better than others at selecting good work samples. My theory is that if your child has sloppy handwriting or is a poor speller, this will strongly work against your child for AAP selection, even though neither handwriting nor spelling ability are very correlated with intelligence.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s not a gifted program anymore.

Teacher remarks should have the most weight. Is the child advanced? Hard working? Curious? Bright? That is the child for AAP.

This. We are in and my child’s scores were not off the chart.

The committee seems to prefer an un-prepped child with scores around 125 over a child who looks prepped but has scores around 135. If the only indication of giftedness is test scores, the committee will assume the child was prepped and will reject the child.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s not a gifted program anymore.

Teacher remarks should have the most weight. Is the child advanced? Hard working? Curious? Bright? That is the child for AAP.

This. We are in and my child’s scores were not off the chart.

Anonymous wrote:There's no consistency or transparency to the process. Most kids in AAP are only slightly above average, yet they're rejecting kids who are probably gifted. It makes no sense at all.

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think aap is the answer to the needs of the profoundly gifted child either though. So the kid who is so gifted as to somehow fail the screening because he has the gifted traits of being a complete pain in the ass wouldn’t nessesarily be better served in aap.

I mean not a week goes by where someone here doesn’t complain about how easy aap is. It’s not a program built to turn around PITA gifted kids.

Anonymous wrote:It’s not a gifted program anymore.

Teacher remarks should have the most weight. Is the child advanced? Hard working? Curious? Bright? That is the child for AAP.