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    JudAU Offline OP
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    CTY has a temporary pilot project where they are accepting other scores for admission. This may be useful if you already have relevant scores and don’t want to take another test.

    https://cty.jhu.edu/testing/testing-pilot

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    It’s interesting that they are accepting only achievement tests, and don’t seem to care about degrees of achievement.

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    Kai Offline
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    It always bugs me when these places base cutoffs on grade placement rather than age.

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    I’m with you, Kai. Accelerated students are penalized with that framework.


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    Kai & aquinas, that has crossed my mind previously as well. Unfortunately, it appears to be the standard, somehow, at most of CTY's peer organizations.

    I can understand it to some extent: using age advantages students who have had greater access to advanced content via their grade acceleration. This is why best practice includes provision for calculating individualized achievement scores using grade norms in the case of grade-retained students (so that instructional deficits are not interpreted as individual deficits). One can, however, think of it the other way: using grade disadvantages those who are most likely to need access to services, since they are the ones most likely to have been grade advanced. It seems to me that the solution ought to be to remove caps on the number of students who can qualify, and stick with age. (Since the usual reason for equity-based decision-making is equitable distribution of limited resources.) I can't imagine that the number of US persons who would legitimately qualify for CTY or similar, and who would have an interest in pursuing eligibility, can be so large that they would need to limit eligibility. Limits on accessing courses would occur naturally, in the form of registration maxima, but at least the pool would include a greater number of those eligible.

    BTW, SET's eligibility framework is more age-based, with hard cutoffs for age <13.0, and age adjustments for age 13.0-13.7. But that's because everyone is taking the same significantly out-of-level test.


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    That makes sense, aeh.

    In the face of constrained (?) resources, there could also be indexed scores for grade accelerated students, whereby grade-based scores are adjusted for age. The two data points, together, likely provide the most accurate picture of individual eligibility, moreso the greater the acceleration. Practically speaking, this would be easy to model.


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    Kai Offline
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    Originally Posted by aeh
    It seems to me that the solution ought to be to remove caps on the number of students who can qualify, and stick with age.

    My theory about restricting numbers (both for in-school gifted programs and programs such as CTY) is that part of the draw is that it's an exclusive club. I think a far more equitable system would be to allow anyone who is interested to attend and then not lower standards.

    I have a recent master's degree in gifted education. I went into the program with a strong bias toward self-contained gifted education and came out having decided that the vast majority of gifted programs are elitist and unethical.

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    Agreed. There are generally more students who qualify (in an absolute, hypothetical sense) than are admitted. And yes, there is an elitist quality to many GT programs--at the same time, having any kind of criteria (objective or otherwise) will unavoidably exclude some students/families who wish to participate. And criteria are important to appropriate placement, not only to admissions--just as every post-secondary institution in the USA uses placement testing/criteria for course selection with already-admitted students. The challenge is finding criteria that accurately represent the population of purpose, but do not discriminate on the basis of a protected class (minimally and legally), and are equitable (however one defines that ethically).

    Open enrollment has much to be said for it, but it still does not addres those who are unaware of resources, do not perceive themselves as falling in the target population, lack the ancillary resources necessary to access the proffered services, etc. for whom proactive child-find is needed. And, of course, the reality is that resources are not infinite.

    No easy answers...


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    Originally Posted by Kai
    I have a recent master's degree in gifted education. I went into the program with a strong bias toward self-contained gifted education and came out having decided that the vast majority of gifted programs are elitist and unethical.

    I would love to hear more! This is something that has occupied my thoughts this past year.


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    Originally Posted by aquinas
    I would love to hear more! This is something that has occupied my thoughts this past year.

    The obsession with testing and cutoff scores means that lots of students who could absolutely benefit from services are shut out because they had a bad day or don't test well or English isn't their first language or whatever. This makes the programs elitist. You can only gain entry if you score at a certain level on a certain day. It doesn't matter if you would benefit from the program and the program would benefit from your presence.

    The only sorts of programs that are ethically defensible are those that provide students who gain entry into the program something that they need that would be inappropriate for students who do not gain entry. So providing enrichment to the identified cohort that all students would benefit from is not ethical. An example of this sort of enrichment might be art lessons or planting a garden. Denying enrichment to unidentified students who would benefit from it even if that enrichment isn't appropriate for all students is also not ethical. And example of this would be participation in weekly sessions using Beast Academy for math.

    It is also unethical to claim to have a gifted program and then not provide services that address the core issue--which is that gifted students need advanced academics, both in terms of opportunities to move more quickly than age peers as well as to encounter content and questions that go beyond what is normally found in the regular curriculum. What's funny is that you can provide both of these things through a combination of acceleration and ability/interest grouping--neither of which require a special program.

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