Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Large Point Discrepancy on Cogat

I talked with a gifted progam coordinator in a public school who is supposed to be extremely experienced in gifted children. The program that she is in charge of is on top of the nation. I mentioned to her about a research paper done in 80s that describe the correlation between the group IQ test like Cogat and individual IQ test like WISC. The result is that the correlation between two only exists among the ordinary people. That makes sense for them to use Cogat in general population. However in the gifted population, the correlation starts to disappear. Furthermore, the negative correlation even shows up in about 30% of cases. This means that the higher IQ the lower Cogat. To my surprise she never heard of it. She said that all the students they selected for their district self-contained program based on Cogat score turn out to have high IQ. Therefore she believes that high Cogat equals to high IQ. Low Cogat equals low IQ.

I think her maths is a bit dodgy. The fact that people who do very well in the Cogat turn out to have a high IQ it does not follow that those who do badly in the Cogat have a low IQ. It is a common sort of mistake but it is sad to find it where you hoped for better.

My DD had somewhat of an opposite profile than your DD. She had a 99+ percentile in non-verbal, 98th in verbal & a 67th in quantitative -- more than a 30 point spread. Of course, according to Riverside and her score profile we should have challenged the validity of her testing. In her case, the scores were high enough for our gifted program.

These scores were enough of a red flag that I made it my personal mission to find out why such a difference. Four years and much testing later, she has a 504 for motor/visual integration issues (dysgraphia, though not officially diagnosed).

If you think something is not quite right, further testing may be your best bet.

Do you have a link to that study? I'm not questioning it at all, but would be interested to read it. I know that Hoagies has mentioned a study like that on the OLSAT, but I hadn't heard the same for the CogAT.

Like I said earlier, our one CogAT experience was not great (plus it was done in a classroom with more than 30 kids, parents walking in and out and talking, and the teacher telling them to just guess and finish if they were running out of time, and a kid with ADD, so it probably would have been bad news either way regardless of the test...). We just wound up having to pay to have dd retested on IQ b/c the CogAT was deemed to show that the first IQ test was due to good guessing. When the second set of IQ testing on three separate measures still showed a HG kid, they quietly backed away from that assertion.

My child got similar unrepresentative scores: verbal 81%, quant 94% nonverb 97%, composite 95%. We are appealing the results because he was so close to the requirements for the HC program -and the verbal was the first test administered, so the Coordinator said that could have contributed to the lower score.

I hope you get the results you are looking for!!