Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Define MG, HG, PG?

Can someone define the general cutoffs for MG, HG, and PG? I'm relatively new to this forum, and I often want to qualify my responses with the fact that my kids are MG or HG (not sure which) as opposed to PG. I feel I have a much different perspective and experience than posters with kids who are in a higher percentile, and in some instances, it makes sense to explain that. Our school-age DS qualifies for our local gifted schools based on his WPPSI-III testing last year, and for our district's HGT program (top 2%), but I don't know whether to characterize him as MG or HG in this forum.

I think if he is *in good company* in his HGT program than that's MG. If he is still bored or struggling to find likeminded peers in the program then HG would explain more.

Everyone uses the lables differently and things vary so much that a kid would be run of the mill gifted in one neighborhood might be a 'we have never seen anything remotely like THIS' in a different neighborhood.

Remember those scores measure unusualness not smartness.

Hope that helps
Grinity

This is a hard question. I think there are a lot of definitions, which makes it hard to pin down an answer.

The Davidson Institute uses a cutoff of 145 for services to what it calls profoundly gifted youth. So my impression is that 145 is PG around here.

I think of gifted as starting around 2 standard deviations above the mean. This is the top 2% and is 130 on 15-point standard deviation test. I think of HG as past the midway point between 130 and 145 (138 corresponds to the 99.4th %ile or so), but that's probably merely my own rambling definition. But it works for me, and if it works for you too, great! Then there will be two of us using the same terms.

Others use different numbers, such as 120 (~90th percentile) as being moderately gifted or mildy gifted (the label depends on the person defining it).

I've also seen terms such as "exceptionally gifted" but I have no idea how "exceptionally" is different from "profoundly." I can see adding a 160+ category called "really profoundly gifted" or something like that. Again, my terminology.

And then it's possible to muddy the waters even more by adding in creative abilities and what I call "thoughtfulness," which is a tendency to try to see as many different aspects of a question as possible.

You may want to check out the Hoagies blurb on MG, HG, EG or PG.
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/highly_profoundly.htm

I find that hoagies chart very helpful too.

Notice that according to that chart, a WISC-IV FSIQ of 145 is HG but if it moves up 7 points then it is the PG range. A bad breakfast on test day could easily knock 7 points off a child's score, but obviously a good cup of yogurt does not make any child PG.

For me personally the most important distinction is between MG and HG. HG is the range where gifted issues start working their dark magic. My informal chart would go:

MG = Excels in school. Honors.
HG = Struggles in school. Bored in honors.
EG = Refuses to go to school.
PG = Already graduated. Fighting to get in to local university before age 15.

Pru, on first read those categories/descriptions I thought they were amusing, but upon reflection,
I can't say I agree with MG=excels in school; partly because, as kids have ranges, schools have ranges too. I have a son tested mg, however is pretty bored, *especially* in areas where he tests lower. Well, he does excel, but he's still pretty darn bored.

Could I say this means he really has more potential than tests have shown? Could be part of the issue.
Could I say this means the school is doing a poor job? Could be part of the issue; they are known for being fairly rigorous, though...

I am also pretty sure there are plenty of HG kids doing GREAT. I was one of those. Honors, etc.

Anyway, my main point is, it's fuzzy!

Chris, I was mainly trying to be amusing at the risk of being unfair, but also trying to illustrate what limited insight I have gained in the last six months trying to wrap my head around this stuff. It is extremely fuzzy. The only real hard lines I've seen in the studies are the gifted issues like intensities that come with the HG territory.

Thank you all, this helped to clarify, if only the fuzziness in it all!

I think that there are real differences among gifted kids, but the further we get from the mean, the less useful tests are in determining who is what. There are so many ways to be gifted that it really starts being more about who matches the test and who had a good day that day. It's not really a linear construct (think about how we would think about an "athletic quotient" test, and how it might compare athletes who excel in very different sports).

Plus, the tests' reliability drops off (error bars go way up) outside of the "average" range -- they're just not designed for fine-grained measurements, even if it looks like they do. Hard cutoff scores are really hard to justify psychometrically, especially if standard error of measurement isn't taken into account.

And fundamentally, I also don't think the distinction between supposed levels of giftedness has much practical use. Yes, there are real differences among kids. But the precise scores or behavioral checklists aren't really how I recognize them and they aren't the information I need. When I'm doing an evaluation and making recommendations, I don't ever find myself saying, "This kid has an IQ of 130 so we should do X, but this other kid has an IQ of 140 so we should do Y." I take a much more multifaceted look at kids, their learning styles, their personalities, their resources, their environments, etc.

I'd suggest that this applies to gifted kids whose schools aren't making significant accommodations for them, though. My older HG one generally wasn't struggling in school and was a straight A honors student when she was allowed to start 6th grade a little before she turned 10. She was still bored in many honors classes, but not to the point that she refused to participate in the process.

I think that personality matters here, too. My older one cares a lot about grades and is not one who would blow things off even if it killed her and she was miserable crying non-stop. (We've been there.)

I was going to say in my second post, but didn't, that the informal distinctions work for some kids, but not so much for certain personality types. I was a HG kid who would have looked MG based on Pru's and Grinity's thoughts, because I was a compliant people pleaser as a child. It never occurred to me to tell my parents that much of my instruction was boring. They knew of my giftedness and put me in a strong program, but I lacked the tools as a young child to realize what was missing and advocate for something better.

Although I thought the intent of my original post was to help me clarify my posts in this forum, I think a deeper reason for the post is my desire to make sure my compliant and wants-to-be-really-good-at-everything DS6 gets what he needs. He has a big spread in WPPSI scores, and I see critical thinking and math/science skills that are high, and reading skills and processing speed skills that are a bit lower, making it difficult for me to figure out what he needs and what's too much. Hurried response, but that't the gist of my thoughts.

LMAO Pru! Ain't that the truth!

Until now I've yet to use the e-mail button, didn't see a use for it. I just e-mailed Pru's definition to the hubby since he's said before "your definition of gifted must be different than when I was growing up." ((i.e. gifted=state spelling bee champion = what special needs?)). He just thinks the boy's normal, just smart, but normal. He just thinks the boy will go to school, if he's well behaved, like a normal kid, and the teacher will see how much he knows and let him teach the class. (I guess, like a normal kid?)

Yeah, I think the chart is fun but not really "on" for my kid. She did/does indeed excel in school, but struggles internally. She has tested MG...though I just had a discussion with her teacher (she attends a gifted school) that suggested that she is significantly outperforming many of her peers, despite being only 3 points over the program's IQ cut-off score.

Talking about special needs. Here's one of my old friends, Jon Pennington. He's now a poster child for bipolar disorder. He basically remembers *everything*, which makes it nice when you talk to him. He always remembers me.

The bipolar diagnosis explains some of his more interesting features.

"Though his own post-competition life was slightly rocky, Pennington warns off anyone looking for scandal in the lives of Spelling Bee winners. "There aren't any... living under bridges or cracking under the pressure. I haven't heard any horror stories, like the cast of Diff'rent Strokes or child stars gone bad. They seem to be average people. The only thing that tends not to be average about them is they tend to be smart and have very large memories and usually have more degrees than the average person."

Nevertheless, it took Pennington nine years to get his postgraduate degrees at the University of California-Berkeley. During that period, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which he believes may have prolonged his academic quest. "That was one thing I didn't even know about myself when I was in the National Spelling Bee," he says. "I'm generally quite open about it. It shows that many people with bipolar disorder are high functioning professional members of society. I do all the things I need to do to keep it in check. I keep healthy, take the right medicines and try to live right. I guess we all have our crosses to bear, everybody's got their 'something.'"
A member of three national Quiz Bowl championship teams, he also spent his years at Berkeley running a website that kept close watch on political conservatives. Now, with his Ph. D in sociology, he's a federal contractor in Washington working for "a minor agency" in the Department of Defense. But, he says, "I'd prefer to be working as a statistical consultant to help the Democrats retake the White House."

www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1624100_1624098_1623359,00.html

I say my son is EG, only because hoagies says he is. LOL!


But, he also refuses to go to school, so he is by Pru's definition as well.

Hell, nine years isn't too bad for a PhD in my book!

I was hoping your friend might have been the winner the year that I competed in the National Spelling Bee, but it looks like he won in 1986---I was there in 1984. I bombed out on my second word, though. (Didn't study even a little.) He might have been there in '84, though--the winners often compete for a few years before they win.

I don't know if he was there in '84, although he probably was there.

I think he finally got annoyed with not winning and simply read the largest dictionaries he could find (including my father's). Since his memory was basically perfect, he won in his last year of eligibility.

We even had a special ceremony in our elementary school for him and watched him perform on the Johnny Carson show.

Spelling was never my thing. I lost on the first round in my elementary school because I couldn't remember the word chute. I will now always remember the word chute (which I spelled shoot).

Hoagies Gifted Education Page addresses levels of giftedness and provides a chart summarizing comparative equivalent score ranges from various assessments:

https://www.hoagiesgifted.org/highly_profoundly.htm

I prefer the term "superior" due to its disambiguity.

(100-114) Mildly Superior
(115-129) Moderately Superior
(130-144) Highly Superior
(145-159) Exceptionally Superior
(160-174) Profoundly Superior
(175+) Supremely Superior

Welcome, Paribus!


The problem with commonly using the word "superior" in relation to intelligence, is that the antonym is "inferior." Unfortunately, these terms may be offensive: to the population at large these words may appear to designate the overall status or worth of a person, not be understood in the limited context of
- a gauge of relative intelligence,
- as measured by a specific test instrument,
- providing a snapshot at a specific point in time.

The term "superior" may also appear to wrongly convey to the general population that an intelligence profile is uniformly even, implying that a person's very high brain function in one area indicates very high brain function in all other areas. However, this is not true.
- The same IQ does not look the same on every person. Different people have different cognitive strengths.
- People can have both intellectual gifts and intellectual challenges, which is termed twice-exceptional (2e).

BTW, over time there has similarly been considerable discussion of the word "gifted" as many also find that term to be divisive, exclusionary, and/or elitist, and therefore off-putting. This thread suggests some words to use, rather than "gifted", when advocating. This thread, School Administrators as Politicians (2015), also advises against using the word "gifted."