Good afternoon,
Below you will find a detailed explanation of:
- Selection Criteria for Screened Admissions.
- Updated Averages for students who are in Groups 1-4.
- Screening Requirements for Consortium Schools.
- Screening Requirements for Bard High School.
Selection Criteria for Screened Admissions
Screened programs will admit the top-performing applicants from across each middle school and citywide. Students will be admitted to screened programs in group order, starting with students in group one.
Students fall into a screened admissions groups based on the average of their final seventh-grade core course grades (ELA, Math, Science, Social Studies). This average must fall into the top percentage of students citywide or at a student’s school in order to fall within a certain admissions group.
These are the average grades needed to fall into the different groups citywide:
To fall into the top __% of applicants citywide…
An applicant needs average core course grades of at least:
Top 15% (Group 1)
94.33
Top 30% (Group 2)
90.25
Top 50% (Group 3)
83.5
Top 70% (Group 4)
76.75
Applicants from non-DOE schools are eligible for an admissions group only by meeting the citywide average.
*Students with an average lower than a 90 will not fall into Group 1, even if they are in the top 15% of their DOE public school. This will be the case for students with an average lower than an 80 for group 2, lower than a 75 for group 3, and lower than 65 for group 4.
If there are more applicants in group one than available seats, students from group one will be randomly selected for seats using the random number linked to each applicant’s application. If all students in group one can be accommodated at a school, students in group two will be considered next; if there are more applicants in group two than remaining available seats, then students in group two will be randomly selected for available seats. This will continue with subsequent groups until all seats are filled.
Applicants can see which screened admissions group they are in on their MySchools profile. On the dashboard, click on “Edit profile” just above your child’s name. Scroll down to see the screened admissions group.
Ninth grade applicants to tenth grade seats will be grouped based on their final eighth-grade grades.
Where can I learn if specific screened programs require additional assessments, and how to complete them?
A small portion of high schools may also require applicants to complete a school-based assessment, such as an essay.
Screened Consortium Schools
Consortium Schools believe that students thrive when they are given the opportunity to study topics in-depth and apply their learning outside of the classroom. Instead of taking tests, our students demonstrate their skills in practical terms: they design experiments, make presentations, write reports, and defend their work to outside experts.Programs
- EAST SIDE COMMUNITY SCHOOL (01M450): East Side Community (M58A)
- INSTITUTE FOR COLLABORATIVE EDUCATION (02M407): Institute for Collaborative Education (M82A)
- SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE HIGH SCHOOL (02M413): School of the Future (M83A)
- BEACON HIGH SCHOOL (03M479): The Beacon School (M71A)
- UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS SECONDARY SCHOOL (07X495): Humanities (X96A)
- UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS SECONDARY SCHOOL (07X495): STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) (X96B)
Instructions
Answer one of the two prompts below in 500 words or fewer:
How do you think a school with this approach to learning will help you grow academically, personally, and creatively? What do you think you have to offer a school community like this?We admire students who are flexible in their approach to learning and willing to take intellectual risks that move them out of their comfort zone. Reflect on a time when you were intellectually challenged, inspired, or took an intellectual risk – inside or outside the classroom. How has that experience shaped you?
Bard High Schools
To apply to either or both of these programs, please complete all three parts of this assessment (Humanities Writing, STEM Writing, and Video).Programs
- BARD HIGH SCHOOL EARLY COLLEGE (01M696): Early College (M51A)
- BARD HIGH SCHOOL EARLY COLLEGE QUEENS (24Q299): Bard High School Early College Queens (Q74B)
Instructions
Please select ONE question to respond to from the following choices. Your response should be between 250-500 words (approximately 1200-2500 characters).
1. Does anything in this story remind you of an experience or interaction you’ve had in your life? How does your experience compare with the experience in the story?
OR
2. How does the author use storytelling to push back against the danger of a single story? Please use an example from the text to support your point?
Please select ONE question to respond to from the following choices. Your response should be between 250-500 words (approximately 1200-2500 characters).
1. You are stranded on an island and you may take one modern invention with you (No cell phones!). Explain why you chose the item and describe some of the issues you may encounter trying to keep the item functional while stranded.
OR
2. Suppose you wake up one morning and suddenly know everything there is to know about math and science. If you could use that knowledge to solve a problem in your community, what problem would you solve? Describe the problem. How would you use math and science to solve the problem?
Please submit a 2 minute (maximum time) video that includes ALL of the following:
A. An introduction to you
B. An answer to both of the questions below:
Our school mission is premised on the belief that many students, from all cultures and backgrounds, are ready and eager to begin taking college-level courses in high school. What makes you want to attend an early college? What about being a Bard student most excites you?
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TEXT A: Excerpt: The Danger of a Single Story
FEBRUARY 2, 2017 BY THECOLUMNMW
How impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available, and they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.
I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.
Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.
Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide’s family.
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is “nkali.” It’s a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another.” Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.
I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.
Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
