> It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high sc

> It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Except...getting good students to go to mediocre high schools sounds like an excellent way to improve the average quality of schools. This goes into a whole discussion of whether we should concentrate gifted students or disperse them, but that's another topic. In practice in Texas when I saw this the effect was very limited, because the best classes were largely full of the would-normally-be-in-other-schools magnet students, and didn't have a ton of uptake from the students in that school's regular geographic region. And then they gave bonus GPA points for taking those classes, so cracking the top 10% as a non-magnet-program student was harder still. Having the classes available was certainly helpful for a small number of students who took them who may not have had access to them otherwise, and concentrating the magnet programs let the district offer more a few more advanced classes than they might have otherwise, but it also somewhat negated any opportunity-spreading effects of the 10% rule.