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Nothing, except maybe college admissions, seems to get New York parents panties into a twist like the city's specialized high schools. Parent have, since the inception of "the Test," been complaining about how unfair it is that admission into the city's math and science schools is decided completely by a test that is taken only once in eighth grade. They complain that at the Boston Latin School admissions takes grades into account and that at the Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia, a sibling school to Stuy, they not only use test scores but also grades, essays and teacher recommendations.
And so today the Times throws fuel into the fire by pointing out a fun quirk in the weighting of scores in the test. Seems a student who gets a perfect or a near perfect on either the verbal or math side of the test barely needs to touch the other part of the test to get into the top schools. In other words:
Last year, for instance, a student with a 99 percentile score in math and 49 percentile in verbal would have been admitted to Stuyvesant High School - the most coveted specialized school - but a student with a 97 in math and 92 in verbal would not.
Ok. But does this quirk, which kind of explains the kids we knew at Stuy who could barely speak English and the kids who took Speaker Building instead of calculus, ever get used in a such an extreme sense? Not very often is our guess. "Last year one-fifth of 1 percent of the more then 25,000 eighth graders who took the test last year scored perfectly on one part." Of those only one student scored below the 60th percentile in the the other part of the test. There's a nice graphic explaining the quirk here.
Which is a long way of saying, if it were up to us we would be hard pressed to change the basics of "the Test." But that's us, what about you?
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The link to the graphic should actually point to the following URI: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/11/12/nyregion/20051112_EXAM_GRAPHICready.html
Its true, I go to stuyvesant. Lots of kids take multivariable calculus but cant write a shit in english. But then again the english curriculum is bullshit, so the 50% asians ruin my any chance of going to a decent college. It would be better to go to a regular high school full of idiots and be the best than the best high school and be average.
I noticed two mispellings / typos in the first paragraph.
misspellings, rather! ha!
I went to TJ and have always wanted a full-blow TJ/Stuy rivalry. Too bad no one else ever seems to agree.
I went to Bronx Science. The "I'd be better off in a regular high school" is a fallacious argument, albeit one many of my peers also made. Colleges know that you're coming from a specialized school, among an academically elite crowd, and handle their admissions accordingly. With schools full of "idiots," the more selective schools are notoriously restrictive regarding the number of applicants they accept; your chances aren't any better.
dennis, are you INSANE? Stuy's english department is arguably the best department in the school. Maybe you got stuck with shitty english classes, but I know quite a number of people (myself included) who would say that the english and history departments have the best teachers in the school, by far.
Also, don't you think it might be time to get a new pic of stuy? just sayin'.
I didnt say its bad. I said the english curriculum isnt strong. How many high school students can write?
"It would be better to go to a regular high school full of idiots and be the best than the best high school and be average."
This comment is precisely the reason why I am so, so, so happy that I didn't grow up in NYC, this alleged bastion of the enlightened.