Sounds like the normative data is outdated since it seems like everyone is at the 99th %ile.

Anonymous wrote:Just remind yourself that 6 feet is tall unless you are on a basketball team. Then you are short.

Yes.

How common is a 99% in this area? Well, nationwide only 1% accomplish it.

DC area is high income but there’s millions of people here so by definition unlikely to be wildly above the mean, esp. since there’s pockets of low scoring (e.g., DCPS). Now yeah if you are talking to the parents hanging out at Saturday morning math prep in Potomac, yeah it’s going to be higher than that. How much is anecdotal and likely inflated via gossip.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reading this you might get depressed. I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility.

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace.

Except according to the data acquired by MCCPTA the lowest FARMS school the top 15% was at the 95%.

Was the qualifying score for high FARMS schools equally impacted? If it took being in the 95th+ percentile in the low FARMS school to be among the top 15% of the cohort, does a kid need something like a 70-75th percentile score in order to be in the top 15% of the highest FARMS cohort?

The MCCPTA data that they released to the FB group showed 95%+ in the top 15% at low FARMS, 92% in top 15% at moderately low FARMS, and 60% was in top 15% for high FARMS.

And for which year and for which magnet program (CES, MS Math/Science/CS or MS Humamities) were those data released to MCCPTA GEC and then posted on the FB group?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reading this you might get depressed. I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility.

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace.

Except according to the data acquired by MCCPTA the lowest FARMS school the top 15% was at the 95%.

See the explanation 2 posts above yours. The local norms that MCCPTA got were for the prior year.

That said, I'm not sure if last year's low-FARMS-locally-normed-85th %ile litmus was 98th %ile vs 2020 norms or if the PP's DC didn't qualify based on another factor (e.g., grades, reading level). We'd only know if MCPS put that data out each year.

I get that you're writing this, but I'll rely on actual data, not hearsay.

Pray tell, to what "actual data" do you refer? Link?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reading this you might get depressed. I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility.

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace.

Except according to the data acquired by MCCPTA the lowest FARMS school the top 15% was at the 95%.

See the explanation 2 posts above yours. The local norms that MCCPTA got were for the prior year.

That said, I'm not sure if last year's low-FARMS-locally-normed-85th %ile litmus was 98th %ile vs 2020 norms or if the PP's DC didn't qualify based on another factor (e.g., grades, reading level). We'd only know if MCPS put that data out each year.

I get that you're writing this, but I'll rely on actual data, not hearsay.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reading this you might get depressed. I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility.

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace.

Except according to the data acquired by MCCPTA the lowest FARMS school the top 15% was at the 95%.

Was the qualifying score for high FARMS schools equally impacted? If it took being in the 95th+ percentile in the low FARMS school to be among the top 15% of the cohort, does a kid need something like a 70-75th percentile score in order to be in the top 15% of the highest FARMS cohort?

The MCCPTA data that they released to the FB group showed 95%+ in the top 15% at low FARMS, 92% in top 15% at moderately low FARMS, and 60% was in top 15% for high FARMS.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reading this you might get depressed. I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility.

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace.

Except according to the data acquired by MCCPTA the lowest FARMS school the top 15% was at the 95%.

See the explanation 2 posts above yours. The local norms that MCCPTA got were for the prior year.

That said, I'm not sure if last year's low-FARMS-locally-normed-85th %ile litmus was 98th %ile vs 2020 norms or if the PP's DC didn't qualify based on another factor (e.g., grades, reading level). We'd only know if MCPS put that data out each year.

I think the 99% kids are often concentrated in bubbles.

My kid was always 97-99 on MAP-M and high 90s on MAP-R. 99 on COGAT. They did get into the middle school stem magnet. But they did not get into Blair's stem magnet.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reading this you might get depressed. I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility.

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace.

That's odd because I thought the information posted on the MCCPTA group obtained through FOIA stated 95% or higher was the cutoff for a low-farms school.

It has changed each year based on the then-calculated local norm for each FARMS rate tranche. That is, if the top 15% of scorers from low-FARMS-categorized schools hit the 98th %ile vs. 2020 norms, then a student at one of those schools scoring in the 97th %ile will not qualify for the lottery. If MAP performance at these schools gets bunched towards the very top, say, because of high levels of exposure to above-grade-level material, small, natural variations in a student's score can become meaningful in lottery qualification even if not particularly meaningful as an assessment of ability (e.g., the low meaning attributed to differences between 97th & 99th, as pointed out earlier).

MCCPTA got info from MCPS two years ago and made that available. MCPS didn't follow up with the same detailed data this past year, though they had mentioned the cutoffs had shifted higher, and I don't think MCCPTA asked. Part of that may have been because MCPS's answers to pointed MCCPTA questions about the prior-year data were obtuse, if provided at all, and suggestions put forth by MCCPTA/community members were roundly ignored; that basically exhausted anyone advocating for change, whether with a different approach or with a minor adjustment.

Do you have any tangible evidence that it was changed from the data which was shared by MCCPTA just last year?

Aside from their having said so to me when I asked, and to others, presumably? Only the anecdotal evidence of knowing scores of several kids who did not make the cutoff last year, but would have (met all the other requirements) if the national %ile litmus had stayed the same.

Again, I don't think they made the numbers publicly known for last year. The MCCPTA request had occurred in 21-22, and the back-and-forth of requesting clarification that I noted occurred through last fall, at least The numbers MCPS gave definitely weren't for the 22-23 evaluations (which would have been Fall '22 MAPs for criteria-based MS magnets & Winter '23 MAP-R for CES). Maybe someone has a link to something I haven't seen, though.

The way you ask ("tangible evidence") makes me think you don't believe what I put out there, but I don't really have a reason to misrepresent anything. Happy to know different if you have or someone else has a link showing that the 85th %ile local norms by FARMS-rate tranche didn't change from the one year to the next.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reading this you might get depressed. I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility.

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace.

Except according to the data acquired by MCCPTA the lowest FARMS school the top 15% was at the 95%.

Was the qualifying score for high FARMS schools equally impacted? If it took being in the 95th+ percentile in the low FARMS school to be among the top 15% of the cohort, does a kid need something like a 70-75th percentile score in order to be in the top 15% of the highest FARMS cohort?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reading this you might get depressed. I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility.

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace.

That's odd because I thought the information posted on the MCCPTA group obtained through FOIA stated 95% or higher was the cutoff for a low-farms school.

It has changed each year based on the then-calculated local norm for each FARMS rate tranche. That is, if the top 15% of scorers from low-FARMS-categorized schools hit the 98th %ile vs. 2020 norms, then a student at one of those schools scoring in the 97th %ile will not qualify for the lottery. If MAP performance at these schools gets bunched towards the very top, say, because of high levels of exposure to above-grade-level material, small, natural variations in a student's score can become meaningful in lottery qualification even if not particularly meaningful as an assessment of ability (e.g., the low meaning attributed to differences between 97th & 99th, as pointed out earlier).

MCCPTA got info from MCPS two years ago and made that available. MCPS didn't follow up with the same detailed data this past year, though they had mentioned the cutoffs had shifted higher, and I don't think MCCPTA asked. Part of that may have been because MCPS's answers to pointed MCCPTA questions about the prior-year data were obtuse, if provided at all, and suggestions put forth by MCCPTA/community members were roundly ignored; that basically exhausted anyone advocating for change, whether with a different approach or with a minor adjustment.

Do you have any tangible evidence that it was changed from the data which was shared by MCCPTA just last year?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reading this you might get depressed. I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility.

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace.

Except according to the data acquired by MCCPTA the lowest FARMS school the top 15% was at the 95%.

Just remind yourself that 6 feet is tall unless you are on a basketball team. Then you are short.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reading this you might get depressed. I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility.

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace.

That's odd because I thought the information posted on the MCCPTA group obtained through FOIA stated 95% or higher was the cutoff for a low-farms school.

np When did MCPS start lowering the admissions standards for kids from higher FARMS schools? Does this apply for all magnet programs in middle and high school too?

That happened in at least two separate approaches.

The first was a change several years back to identify whether there were local cohorts of high-ability students whose needs could be addressed together at the local school, instead of at the magnet, which would then only take real outliers from the high-performing (usually lower-FARMS) schools, leaving more room at magnets for students fron higher-FARMS schools who might not score as high as those kept with their local cohort at a low-FARMS school, but who were local outliers, themselves (no manageably large cohort to allow their needs to be addressed locally). That still called on something of a rank-ordering, with the different lens just noted, and offering seats to the highest on the list first.

That was abandoned with the pandemic, where they had little confidence in the measures they would have used to rank-order students. They then cast a wide net to identify those who might benefit from a magnet, including the local norming by FARMS-rate tranche, conducting a lottery among any who were identified. That net tightened the second year, but the local norming and lottery (vs. rank-ordering) was maintained.

This applied to elementary and middle school criteria-based magnet programs. High school magnet program admissions has seen adjustment (e.g., discontinuation of teacher recommendations, etc.), but is still more or less a rank-ordered process, rather than a lottery. ES & MS local-school programming -- ELC, Compacted Math (though less directly related), HIGH and AIM (now largely shifting to AMP 7+) -- has been increased, though variably well implemented and not seen to be true magnet-experience equivalents, to address those left out by the lottery process. Most of the presentations to the BOE on the matter have focused on the demographic distributions of those offered/accepting seats.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reading this you might get depressed. I think a lot of people here exaggerate both on how commonplace high scores are, but also on what any of that means.

For one, the tails of these exams are not predictive of anything. In other words, 97% is not that meaningfully different from 99% and definitely not 99.75%. Its also a terrible test altogether because it measures exposures to various materials, not innate logical or reasoning skills.

My kids were 98/99 percentile in math/reading depending on year They got into CES, magnet middle and magnet high schools. We live in a low FARMs area *and* we are Asian (so should be a double whammy on acceptances but obviously not). We didn't enrich at all. It was all fine. Also, the kids with the highest MAP M scores in 8th grade were not necessarily the best Multivariate students so it's just one test folks with questionable utility.

I am not Asian, but one of my children went through these programs. My younger one might. They're equally smart, but with the lotteries and all today, I'm not all that optimistic since it's more about DEI than test scores now.

My DC didn’t qualify for the lottery with a MAP-R score in the 97th percentile because the 97th percentile nationwide wasn’t within the top 15% of MCPS test takers in our low FARMs cohort of schools. So the MCPS-wide mean might be only 2 points or whatever higher than the national norm but among the low FARMS schools, being in the 98/99th percentile is pretty commonplace.

That's odd because I thought the information posted on the MCCPTA group obtained through FOIA stated 95% or higher was the cutoff for a low-farms school.

It has changed each year based on the then-calculated local norm for each FARMS rate tranche. That is, if the top 15% of scorers from low-FARMS-categorized schools hit the 98th %ile vs. 2020 norms, then a student at one of those schools scoring in the 97th %ile will not qualify for the lottery. If MAP performance at these schools gets bunched towards the very top, say, because of high levels of exposure to above-grade-level material, small, natural variations in a student's score can become meaningful in lottery qualification even if not particularly meaningful as an assessment of ability (e.g., the low meaning attributed to differences between 97th & 99th, as pointed out earlier).

MCCPTA got info from MCPS two years ago and made that available. MCPS didn't follow up with the same detailed data this past year, though they had mentioned the cutoffs had shifted higher, and I don't think MCCPTA asked. Part of that may have been because MCPS's answers to pointed MCCPTA questions about the prior-year data were obtuse, if provided at all, and suggestions put forth by MCCPTA/community members were roundly ignored; that basically exhausted anyone advocating for change, whether with a different approach or with a minor adjustment.