Thomas Jefferson High School (Arlington, Alexandria: to buy, school districts, cost)

[Yankeesfan]

Parents at TJ actually have the advantage here since they come from all over the county. School Board members, like Supervisors, tend to defer to each other on matters within each other's districts. However all School Board members have constituents who go to TJ. Therefore every TJ parent who opposes this needs to contact their own district School Board member, plus the three at-large members. I don't know the mechanics but with enough uproar, the School Board should be able to stop this. Also contact the Post, Times, Examiner, and the weekly newspapers, whether by alerting reporters or letters to the editor.

[cardinal2007]

Originally Posted by Denton56

The principal is claiming that this is a GOOD thing for TJ. He's claiming that colleges will now have to treat TJ as the special school that it is. Hahahaha. Of course schools aren't going to bother to calculate the GPA for each of the TJ kids because they are from a "special school". It's BS and any reasonable person would recognize it as such.

Harvard gets 20,000 applications each year. There is NO chance that they have a staff big enough to calculate/recalculate the GPA's of ALL those apps in a couple of months, or less.

Have you worked in admissions at these schools, my undergraduate college pretty much said that they don't care how the districts weight the APs or honors courses, they take the raw scores and calculate the scores themselves, even dropping some courses like PE and Driver's Ed. But now that you mention it, that would seem like a lot of work for so many apps. I'll have to ask someone in my alma mater what it is they really do.

[Denton56]

Ah, yes, I have actually spoken with people who work in the admissions offices at Georgetown, Cornell, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UVA, and Harvard. They all agreed that they do not have the time or personnel to recalculate ALL the GPAs on all their applications. Mulitply 15 or 20 minutes by thousands of applications and see if you think any school would have a staff large enough to do that. The first cut is done based on GPA and SAT score. TJ students will be at a disadvantage since they will have no GPA.

Fairgrade convinced the school board to change how FCPS weights GPA's because those GPA's made such a HUGE difference in how FCPS students fared at college admissions, and scholarships, across the country, at thousands of colleges. The founder of Fairgrade is a former admissions officer at Georgetown, and other colleges, so she knew the facts, first hand. If you don't think that grades and GPAs matter, you can find more at fairgrade.org. Check out their research, and check out their recommendations for TJ.

[Muffy62]

Originally Posted by Denton56

Fairgrade convinced the school board to change how FCPS weights GPA's because those GPA's made such a HUGE difference in how FCPS students fared at college admissions, and scholarships, across the country, at thousands of colleges.

And that is why the no GPA at TJ does not make sense. Many of the merit scholarships require a high GPA and SAT score -- how can TJ students compete if they don't have a GPA?????

This suggestion of doing away with the GPA would never have come up if the Fairfax superintendent/board given those advance science/tech courses the weighting they deserve. I thought our local school board/superintendent was bad but Fairfax takes the cake on this issue.

[JEB77]

Here are the stats from FCPS on the number of National Merit Semi-Finalists in the county schools:

TJ 149
Madison 8
Langley 7
McLean 7
Oakton 7
Westfield 6
Marshall 5
West Springfield 5
Woodson 5
Lake Braddock 4
Chantilly 2
Hayfield 2
Herndon 2
West Potomac 2
Annandale 1
Centreville 1
Edison 1
Fairfax 1
Falls Church 1
Robinson 1
South Lakes 1
Stuart 1
Lee 0
Mount Vernon 0
South County 0

TJ itself has as many National Merit Semi-Finalists as all the high schools in Montgomery County, MD combined and the total number in Fairfax (219) is considerably larger than the total in Montgomery (149). If memory serves me correctly, the numbers used to be comparable, or the number of semi-finalists in Montgomery County used to be slightly higher than in Fairfax.

[Denton56]

Interesting that TJ has expanded in size to nearly 500 per class, up from 400-425, but the number of National Merit Scholar semi finalists has gone down, or stayed about the same. For the years around 1999 to 2004, the number was always around 155 to 159.

I am not surprised that Montgomery County schools are producing fewer National merit students. Their schools have gone even more loony lib that Fairfax county, with even less emphasis on academics and merit.

I am glad to see that Madison high school administration has gotten the message from their community and their students are once again excelling in academics.

Yes, TJ will be hurt with no GPA's on their transcript but it would appear no one in the FCPS administration cares. You can bet they would care if someone was proposing hurting students at one of the lowest performing schools, like South Lakes, or Stuart.

[JEB77]

Here's the distribution of National Merit Semi-Finalists in Montgomery County by way of comparison to Fairfax:

Blair 53
Richard Montgomery 28
Wootton 19
Whitman 17
Churchill 11
Walter Johnson 5
B-CC 4
Northwest 3
Damascus 2
Poolesville 2
Clarksburg 1
Gaithersburg 1
Rockville 1
Seneca Valley 1
Springbrook 1
Blake 0
Einstein 0
Kennedy 0
Magruder 0
Northwood 0
Paint Branch 0
Quince Orchard 0
Sherwood 0
Watkins Mill 0
Wheaton 0

What it seems to indicate is that Blair - while it has a magnet program - is not as large or alluring a magnet as TJ, and the gaps among the neighborhood schools in Montgomery are more pronounced than in Fairfax. Richard Montgomery has over three times as many NMS as Madison, but on the other hand 40% of the Montgomery high schools did not have a single semi-finalist this year, whereas the corresponding figure in Fairfax was only 12%.

[live_strong28]

Looking at the NMS breakouts, the top regular high schools in MC squash the top regular high schools in FFX Cty.

It may also indicate that in MC, a lot more of the kids who qualify for the magnet program may prefer to stay with their neighborhood school vice in FFX.

What is may also be lost in this is that the top wealthy kids may also elect to go to western MC's many excellent private schools which are more abundant in MC vice FFX.

[Denton56]

Richard Montgomery is an IB magnet, a real magnet. That's why they have so many NMS finalists. Most of the rest of country does the IB that way. Fairfax County should too. Two REAL Ib magnets, one at each end of the county, in South Lakes and Mt. Vernon would help both of those schools and allow the other IB schools to return to the AP program.

[live_strong28]

Well, Wootton, Whitman, and Churchill which are regular HS's have more than Madison also.

I think the SAT scores between the top schools in both counties are about the same though.