Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Spring Birthday?

I vaguely remember reading one of those books about success a while ago. Unfortunately the title escapes me now, but what I remember is how in Canadian professional hockey there is a cluster of players with fall birthdays because of the way they select for advancement during youth hockey- ie the fall birthday players are the oldest. They are selected young and given the most cultivation.

I'm asking this because I'm curious if there is a similar situation with DYS.

We've never been big testers, and haven't felt we've needed DYS because we've always homeschooled. Now that dd is a teen and, while socially adept, mostly feels very out of step with the teens around her. They just don't get her. We're looking at "gifted" early college high school program, but we were surprised that it wasn't really that gifted. Most of the Juniors are doing work that she's done or is doing as an 8th or 9th grader.

Dd is a spring birthday and has had all the DYS scores for her grade, just never all at the same time for the school-based tests (SAT, etc.) If she was just a couple months younger, bumping her down a school year, she'd clearly be qualified every single time.

We also don't really take these test very seriously, just as a benchmark from year to year, so I'm sure they are riddled with errors where she hasn't read the question well. (This is how she makes almost all of her errors in regular tests for school).

Do the pysc-administered tests adjust for year/ months? Is a psyc-administered test worth pursuing now that she's in high school? I feel like she's caught in a weird doughnut hole of qualification, but I'm not sure qualifying for DYS would gain her anything socially, anyhow.

She was evaluated with something in maybe kindergarten with one of these, but we had traveled for the test, she was uncooperative, having an allergic reaction, ceilinged the tests and we ran out of time. Although I think she was close to DYS (the psyc said we should retest in year or so), anyhow, we never tried again just because of distance and cost.

Alternatively,(ETA- more importantly) is there a social network/ opportunity I'm missing? We're in the Midwest, and NUMATS has been pretty hit-or-miss for us. Our state doesn't have much at all. We're hitting the camps pretty hard this year, but we've topped out everything I can come up with otherwise.

I agree with you.

It doesn't make sense to have the SAT/ACT score cutoffs by grade, especially when you're dealing with a population that may be accelerated by one or more whole grades, subject accelerated in school, or homeschooled at an appropriate level. All three may be learning the same things, but the students who are "officially" at the higher grade are being evaluated differently.