I guess she was prepping for the SAT for the Hopkins program or something.
Now THAT I thought wasn't appropriate.
I guess that's why I wouldn't use the 'what is legal' approach here. Both talent search testing and tests like the CogAT and OLSAT are used as aptitude or ability tests. While they aren't controlled tests like IQ tests, schools use them that way. I've known people who've crossed the line much more than buying practice tests (there are ways to get copies of the actual test).
I, too, understand the despiration especially as, like others have mentioned, what passes as GT placement is often something many kids could benefit from and which is not sufficient for kids who are gifted. As a parent of a 2e child who is a very out of the box thinker, a test like the CogAT was not in her benefit. Would I have prepped her to get a higher score so she'd be recognized as gifted? In hindsight, I still don't know that I would have. Why? Because the message it would give my daughter wouldn't be one I'd want to convey. I wouldn't want her to think that her scores on this one test were so important that she had to do everything she could to do well on it, that being called gifted by the schools was a status symbol... Part of this comes from the way gifted is treated in our local schools. It is treated as better. The kids who are in GT pull outs brag about it. The parents brag about it.
Instead of prepping dd (which might not have done much good anyway, to be honest), I took the route of arguing with the district about their policy and got them to change it. They wouldn't take dd's upper 140s WISC scores, but after getting an entire committee together to review dd's test scores, they now will take IQ scores. If the process is flawed, I'm more in favor of fighting to make it right than doing questionable things to fit within it although I certainly do understand the temptation.
