3.5 GPA and enrollment in Algebra I in 8th grade. Admissions are geographical because the school is a public school in Fairfax County, though students from neighboring counties can apply and attend.

Of course GPA isn’t flawless. You’ll find that activists also seek to solve pipeline problems at lower grades. But this is a rapid retreat from “an objective measure is obviously better” to “this specific measure is better than proposed alternatives.”

Using exam score cutoffs was discussed. Generally, people prefer gpa to exams because there isn’t the same explicit cottage industry of exam prep (yes, private tutoring obviously exists) and it includes a wider range of material than what is included on the test. Exam score cutoffs was also deemed unacceptable and similarly called racist and destructive by the same opponents of the proposed policy.

Having thought about this a while longer, I've changed my mind.

I don't really see any purpose in randomization, except anti-meritocracy pro-diversity. It is potentially excusable at the edges to account for the inherent noise of measurement (i.e. is 3.4 GPA really that different from 3.6 GPA) but there's no real reason that someone with 4 GPA shouldn't have a greater shot at admission than someone with 3.5 GPA.

Of course, if your distrust in GPA is so great that you oppose even that, then... what even the point of GPA in the first place? We should be working towards improving the metrics, not eliminating them.

But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."

> But otherwise, this whole randomisation business is like, "Would you like to be operated on by the surgeon, or by the nurse? Oh, wait, let's flip a coin."

We are discussing high school education admissions right now. The kids being evaluated are 13. What is schooling for? Do admissions exist to make sure that some unqualified kid never gets access to a strong education? That conservative approach can make sense for life-or-death interactions like surgery, but nobody dies if a "less qualified" kid is sent to TJ (actually, since suicide rates have increased as the school has gotten more competitive, it might actually save lives).

GPA measures several things at the same time. It most explicitly measures what you have done. But in admissions we want some measure of future potential. This is not aligned perfectly with what somebody has done in the past. Were we to change grading to a continuous evaluation of future potential then I'd be much more accepting of a stricter hierarchy in admissions, but I am extremely skeptical that such a metric would be achievable without introducing tremendous biases.

My GPA in middle school was about a 4.0. But when I review my life, the reason it was so high included many many things that were unrelated to my future potential as a student.

We can also take a step back and consider why we even have limited-access accelerated education in the first place. GMU is just down the street. Even discussing the idea of opening up accelerated education to anybody who wants it is also considered being "an enemy of excellence" by opponents.

Finally, your note about surgeons and nurses is interesting, given the history. Prior to understanding of germ theory, it would have been preferable to be operated on by a nurse. Obviously, this is an extreme example but it clearly demonstrates how widespread understanding of "merit" can actually be totally broken.

I think we share a lot of frustrations regarding the present state of the education system, but I still don't understand exactly what part randomisation is supposed to solve (except your anecdotal point about suicides, which I would easily counter with equally anecdotal or suicide rates might increase further as you'd be adding stress of randomisation on top of stress of performance). It appears to me that a lot of the problems you highlight would actually be solved with more/better metrics (including SATs / IQ tests, as these predict future performance).

I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling). For example, I always excelled at (and was interested in) math (other subjects, like physics and chemistry, I just excelled at but wasn't that interested in), so I think both I (individually, in future earnings) and the society (collectively, in future value/invention/...) would benefit tremendously if I was given harder math classes at an earlier age. There's a lot of kids like me, and in other subjects as well. But this would require better metrics and identifying such students earlier (even without any rate-limiting, simply to identify talent and steer it in the right direction).

Randomization expands access to qualified students who cannot access the same preparatory material or have divergent mental behaviors that do not hinder their ability to learn but do impact their ability to take tests.

The recent admitted class for TJ has seen absolutely enormous increases in the population of economically disadvantaged students as well as students on the autism spectrum or with other neuroatypical situations.

It therefore (in my mind) provides a more just system of allocation limited access to accelerated education, while we live in a world with such limited access.

> I agree though that there's no good reason for gatekeeping education. In fact, in my ideal world, you'd have per-subject fast tracks available for anyone (or, more generally, non-age-specific schooling).

My experience has been that promoting these policies receives even greater criticisms that me and my friends are racists who hate excellence. It is ridiculous to me that FCPS has a gated system for accelerated learning when there is a commuter-focused college right there. But if I go to school board meetings and suggest that we take resources and allocate them for this purpose, I'm called an "asian-hater".

My family saw a similar thing happen to them many years ago. The local GT programs were drawing students only from a select few (almost entirely white) schools and it turned out that a lot of this was due to how students were identified as candidates. My parents sought to change things, which did not deny any access to white students but instead expanded access and funding so that simply more people had access to accelerated education and... my parents were called "white traitors" by neighbors.

This is why I get so worked up about this stuff when people claim that support for a particular form of admissions exam is by definition support for promoting merit or promoting excellence.