In my state, kids are screened before they are given an IQ test. Approved screeners are the NNAT, OLSAT, K-BIT, and Slosson. DD9 did not do well on the NNAT because she's highly verbal and weak on visual-spatial. The school told me that they don't use the K-BIT and Slosson because they're "too hard", and all kids will take the OLSAT in 3rd grade anyway. I did some digging and found out (from the gifted specialist at the state dept. of ed)that the reason no one uses these two screeners is because the tests have been poorly administered in the past and kids were also passing questions to each other. As a result, the state raised the cutoff scores so much that it's hard to qualify for services with these tests.

This makes me really angry. My highly verbal kid gets left out as a result of all of this mess, and we really don't have many options since the state doesn't accept private testing. I can request a more verbal screener, but what's the point? We're hoping she does well on the OLSAT in the spring...

Thanks for letting me vent.