How Were TJHSST Commended Students Harmed?

Part II:  (Part I: What’s a National Merit Scholar?)

The two parents driving this story, Asra Nomani, a former reporter and academic, and Shawnna Yashar, a lawyer, would have probably successfully grabbed the media cycle even if TJ’s administration had been error free. They are passionately committted to challenging the admissions changes at the school as leading members of organization challenging the school’s new admission policy..  Both were heavily involved in the election controversy that nearly got the school’s PTSA organization expelled from the national chapter, while Yashar spearheaded the lawsuit against Fairfax County School Board for keeping the schools closed.  I support their right to advocate;  my point here is simply that this entire issue didn’t occur as an organic parent movement but a focused, target effort to criticize the school.

The original story written by Nomani, makes the following accusations:

“For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships.”

These charges are all false.

The two adminstrators in question, principal Ann Bonitatibus and director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, have not been “withholding notifications”. They have not been denying the students with National Merit Commended status anything whatsoever. Commended ranking is not considered an award and does not render a student eligible for any scholarships they weren’t otherwise qualified for.

I’m reasonably certain TJ’s administrators simply overlooked notifying National Merit Commended students this year, and this year only.

Fairfax County School District says, categorically, that “each year”, TJ notifies students and that only this year had neither “email nor personal notification” occurred,  probably “a unique situation due to human error”. The district–not the school–is saying that TJ’s Commended notifications happen on time each year. The rest of this piece assumes that the Bonitatibus and Kosatka had to prove this to the district and that this year was, in fact, an error. Which strikes me as likely.

The most likely explanation for human error is that National Merit screwed up and didn’t put enough postage on the huge pack of 240 Commended certificates that were sent to the school, so the package got there late. Instead of arriving in late September, they arrived in mid-October. Given the relentless administrative calendars,  it’s quite believable that to someone, probably Kosatka, had moved onto other date-driven tasks and just forgot to build the email list and notify the students. As I wrote earlier about the life of an administrator, the task is a combination of grinding day to day tasks and

Routine yearly or regularly scheduled events that nonetheless require planning, which at the high school level might look like: the master schedule, state tests, graduation, accreditation.

Add “National Merit Commended notifications” to that list, particularly at a school where over 100 kids make semi-finalist alone. So maybe the director of Student Services, Brandon Kosatka, missed his window because of the delayed delivery and went on to the next pressing item on the school calendar and then six weeks later said oh shit I forgot and sent out the certificates in November.

So there it is. Because the school was late sending out the certificates, commended students who didn’t seek out the information on their own didn’t have the opportunity to list it as a fairly minor honor on their early admissions applications.

That’s….not a big deal.

One thing people need to remember is that TJ’s senior class is still part of the old highly competitive admissions process and even now still a highly competitive high school. TJ admission itself is a rough proxy for top 3-4% of all students. In 2022,  132 TJ students got Semifinalist, 240 got Commended. The remaining 19% of the 2023 graduating class probably had scores that missed the 3% cutoff by a point or two. In that context, Kosatka’s comment that “celebrating all but a few of the students” makes sense. They aren’t worried about low-achieving students resenting the two or three honors students, but rather actively making a big deal out of 80% of the class when the distinction is without a difference, at the TJ level.

Semifinalist is useful to a TJ student. Commended is not. (*Important future caveat below.) Commended wasn’t even that big a deal to the students themselves.  In the November emails written by an angry parent (presumably activist lawyer Shawnna Yashar), she admits that her son didn’t even bother to tell her about his Commended status because it’s not a big deal. The emails also show that the school used to have a National Merit ceremony, but nobody came so they quit having it.

So the only screwup the school made was in failing to deliver relatively meaningless certificates or notification, probably because the certificates arrived late. Not only would this have minimal impact….well, understand that the deparment is called “student services” for a reason, not “mandated responsibilities”. High school counselling departments spend a huge amount of time and money on helping their seniors in college admissions, but high schools themselves have very few, if any, legally required duties regarding the application process.

To put this minor delay in notification in perspective:

If a district deliberately withheld notification of Semi-finalist status–a far more consequential award–or  through incompetence or woke policy refused to complete the required paperwork for students, that school wouldn’t have violated any education law that the offended student could point to. Winning any sort of damages would be difficult.  What would the damages be? They might have made it to finalist status? Cool, but so what? They might have gotten a scholarship? Hard to prove. I’m sure people would have been fired in that event. But in a case far more actively damaging and malicious than what is at hand here, there’s still not a lot of legal obligation students can demand from their school. All responsibilities regarding college admission are on the student. Even if the school screws up.

The strategists driving this media manipulation understand, I think, that the failure notification story wouldn’t hold up–it was almost immediately challenged, although sadly not by anyone in the media reporting on this.  That may explain why they have emphasized that the failure to notify students rendered them ineligible for National Merit scholarships.

This is either a deliberate lie or simple ignorance.

Commended students aren’t eligible for any National Merit scholarships. The only related scholarships they can apply for are called Special Scholarships with corporate sponsorship. (The first link goes through the procedure I’ve summarized below, the second has a list of sponsors and criteria on pages 9-10).

In many cases, corporations offer a specific number of grants to high school seniors of employees (sometimes also in a specific region or seniors with a particular major). In years when they can’t find enough finalists meeting their criteria, they will use non-finalists.  

To qualify for a special scholarship, students have to complete an Entry Form with the sponsoring corporation as well as an application with the National Merit  by mid-December. The National Merit program then compiles a specific list of students that qualify for each particular scholarship. Commended students have no priority over non-commended. If the scholarship goes to non-finalists, the award is not designated National Merit and recipients can’t call themselves National Merit Scholars.

Any student who didn’t apply or didn’t meet the specific criteria would not be considered. Any student whose parents worked for a company offering a corporate scholarship could have filled out an application at any time after getting their PSAT scores the year before. The delayed or even non-existent notification of Commended status is completely irrelevant and oh, by the way, came in long before the deadline for Special Scholarships.

No Commended student was denied the right to earn a scholarship because there are no scholarships for Commended students.

Like I said: lying or ignorant.

The only potential harm done by the delayed notification was in the limited sense that students who weren’t aware that Commended cutoffs could be looked up online and who would have included that information on their early admissions applications. That’s a small group. And that potential harm is being remedied by the school reaching out to colleges to ensure they have this information for the students’ applications.

This whole story is just utter, unmitigated bullshit–so much so that I’ve spent considerable time trying to see if I’ve missed something. Surely someone who gets paid to report would have looked up some of this? But not.

I understand why the activist parents are ginning up the story. They want to create political or even legal sympathy for their efforts to restor TJ’s admissions policies.

I don’t understand why the media–not just the reporters, but the many pundits and policy analysts on Twitter–doesn’t take the time to do even minimal research to understand how asinine this story is. Sure, these are people on both the left and right who despise public schools and consider them incompetent. But they aren’t supposed to be activist hacks.

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*Many colleges are now prohibiting test scores as part of admissions. TJ is also ending its test-based admissions so it will no longer be a given that the students are top 3-4%. The class of 2026 may value Commended status in a way that current TJ students do not. No test-based admissions, no test scores on applications,  top 3% might be useful information. This doesn’t explain why current parents are freaking out, as it would have no impact on current seniors. It might explain why the school took the step of reaching out to the colleges and why they are planning on new procedures going forward.

Evaluating the New PSAT: Reading and Writing

The College Board has released a new practice PSAT, which gives us a lot of info on the new SAT. This essay focuses on the reading and writing sections.

As I predicted in my essay on the SAT’s competitive advantage, the College Board has released a test that has much in common with the ACT. I did not predict that the homage would go so far as test plagiarism.

This is a pretty technical piece, but not in the psychometric sense. I’m writing this as a long-time coach of the SAT and, more importantly, the ACT, trying to convey the changes as I see them from that viewpoint.

For comparison, I used these two sample ACT, this practice SAT (old version), and this old PSAT.

Reading

The old SAT had a reading word count of about 2800 words, broken up into eight passages. Four passages were very short, just 100 words each. The longest was 800 words. The PSAT reading count was around 2000 words in six passages. This word count is reading passages only; the SAT has 19 sentence completions to the PSAT’s 13.

So SAT testers had 70 minutes to complete 19 sentence completions and 47 questions over eight passages of 2800 words total. PSAT testers had 50 minutes to complete 13 sentence and 27 questions over six passages of 2000 words total.

The ACT has always had 4 passages averaging 750 words, giving the tester 35 minutes to complete 40 questions (ten for each passage). No sentence completions.

Comparisons are difficult, but if you figure about 45 seconds per sentence completion, you can deduct that from the total time and come up with two rough metrics comparing reading passages only: minutes per question and words per question (on average, how many words is the tester reading to answer the questions).

Metric	Old SAT	Old PSAT	ACT	New PSAT
Word Count	2800	2000	3000	3200
Passage Count	8	6	4	5
Passage Length	100-850	100-850	750	500-800
MPQ	1.18	1.49	1.14	1.27
WPQ	59.57	74.07	75	69.21

I’ve read a lot of assertions that the new SAT reading text is more complex, but my brief Lexile analysis on random passages in the same category (humanities, science) showed the same range of difficulty and sentence lengths for old SAT, current ACT, and old and new PSAT. Someone with more time and tools than I have should do an indepth analysis.

Question types are much the same as the old format: inference, function, vocabulary in context, main idea. The new PSAT requires the occasional figure analysis, which the College Board will undoubtedly flaunt as unprecedented. However, the College Board doesn’t have an entire Science section, which is where the ACT assesses a reader’s ability to evaluate data and text.

Sentence completions are gone, completely. In passage length and overall reading demands, the new PSAT is remarkably similar in structure and word length to the ACT. This suggests that the SAT is going to be even longer? I don’t see how, given the time constraints.

tl;dr: The new PSAT reading section looks very similar to the current ACT reading test in structure and reading demands. The paired passage and the questions types are the only holdover from the old SAT/PSAT structure. The only new feature is actually a cobbled up homage to the ACT science test in the form of occasional table or graph analysis.

Writing

I am so flummoxed by the overt plagiarism in this section that I seriously wonder if the test I have isn’t a fake, designed to flush out leaks within the College Board. This can’t be serious.

The old PSAT/SAT format consisted of three question types: Sentence Improvements, Identifying Sentence Error, and Paragraph Improvements. The first two question types presented a single sentence. In the first case, the student would identify a correct (or improved) version or say that the given version was best (option A). In the ISEs, the student had to read the sentence cold with no alternatives and indicate which if any underlined word or phrase was erroneous (much, much more difficult, option E was no change). In Paragraph Improvements, the reader had to answer grammar or rhetoric questions about a given passage. All questions had five options.

The ACT English section is five passages running down the left hand side of the page, with underlined words or phrases. As the tester goes along, he or she stops at each underlined section and looks to the right for a question. Some questions are simple grammar checks. Others ask about logic or writing choices—is the right transition used, is the passage redundant, what would provide the most relevant detail. Each passage has 15 questions, for a total of 75 questions in 45 minutes (9 minutes per passage, or 36 seconds per question). The tester has four choices and the “No Change” option is always A.

The new PSAT/SAT Writing/Language section is four passages running down the left hand side of the page, with underlined words or phrases. As the tester goes along, he or she stops at each underlined section and looks to the right for a question. Some questions are simple grammar checks. Others ask about logic or writing choices—is the right transition used, is the passage redundant, what would provide the most relevant detail. Each passage has 11 questions, for a total of 44 questions in 35 minutes (about 8.75 minutes per passage or 47 seconds a question). The tester has four choices and the “No Change” option is always A.

Oh, did I forget? Sometimes the tester has to analyze a graph.

The College Board appears to have simply stolen not only the structure, but various common question types that the ACT has used for years—as long as I’ve been coaching the test, which is coming on for twelve years this May.

I’ll give some samples, but this isn’t a random thing. The entire look and feel of the ACT English test has been copied wholesale—I’ll add “in my opinion” but don’t know how anyone could see this differently.

Writing Objective:

• Best Conclusion: ACT vs. New PSAT
• Add Best Detail: ACT vs. New PSAT
• Best Transitioning for Paragraph:ACT vs. PSAT

Style and Logic:

• Logical Placement: ACT vs. New PSAT
• Check for Conciseness/Redundancy: ACT vs. New PSAT
• Check for Formal Style: ACT vs. New PSAT
• Logically Correct Transition (cause, contrast, continuation): ACT vs. New PSAT
• Writer Choice: ACT vs. New PSAT

Grammar/Punctuation:

• Dash vs. Semicolon: ACT vs. New PSAT
• The apostrophe/plural check: ACT vs. New PSAT

tl;dr: The College Board ripped off the ACT English test. I don’t really understand copyright law, much less plagiarism. But if the American College Test company is not considering legal action, I’d love to know why.

The PSAT reading and writing sections don’t ramp up dramatically in difficulty. Timing, yes. But the vocabulary load appears to be similar.

The College Board and the poorly informed reporters will make much of the data analysis questions, but I hope to see any such claims addressed in the context of the ACT’s considerably more challenging data analysis section. The ACT should change the name; the “Science” section only uses science contexts to test data analysis. All the College Board has done is add a few questions and figures. Weak tea compared to the ACT.

As I predicted, The College Board has definitely chosen to make the test more difficult for gaming. I’ve been slowly untangling the process by which someone who can barely speak English is able to get a high SAT verbal and writing score, and what little I know suggests that all the current methods will have to be tossed. Moving to longer passages with less time will reward strong readers, not people who are deciphering every word and comparing it to a memory bank. And the sentence completions, which I quite liked, were likely being gamed by non-English speakers.

In writing, leaving the plagiarism issue aside for more knowledgeable folk, the move to passage-based writing tests will reward English speakers with lower ability levels and should hurt anyone with no English skills trying to game the test. That can only be a good thing.

Of course, that brings up my larger business question that I addressed in the competitive advantage piece: given that Asians show a strong preference for the SAT over the ACT, why would Coleman decide to kill the golden goose? But I’ll put big picture considerations aside for now.

Here’s my evaluation of the math section.