Let me preface this by stating that I'm HG/HG+, though I've got at least one S-B in my past that would argue that I'd have been DYS material--
my ITBS scores (back in the day) would have been, as Cricket notes, broken down into subsections and scored with percentiles as well as GE's.
When I took it in third grade, I do know that my dad was blown away by my GE's-- which were all 9th-13th grade (what 13th grade is, I do not know... but at least then, this indicated "post secondary" as opposed to "struggling to finish high school curriculum"
) My mom, an educator herself, quickly talked him down by pointing out that being the smart at third grade material didn't make a 12th grader some kind of genius. LOL.
The percentiles were a different story. THOSE were the real news.
My percentiles on that third grade ITBS would have been 98's and higher across the board.
My parents were offered a grade skip-- but opted to instead place me in the lower grade in several consecutive split level classrooms, and follow with middle and high school GT programming. (I continued to earn 98th percentiles and higher on every other standardized test I've ever taken, btw.)
My daughter, who
is PG, has never taken the ITBS, but on a similar, nationally normed battery, scored straight 99.9 percentiles-- taken two years out of level when she was six. She has continued to test on normed tests (state testing, etc) 97th-99.9th percentiles for the following seven years-- again, testing 2-4 years out of level.
I mention this anecdote because she and I are both people who naturally "test well" (so actually this kind of nationally normed assessment IS reasonably accurate for both of us) and there is a big difference once you move out past the second standard deviation of the cognitive ability curve. There is a world of difference between a child at 95th percentiles and one at 98th-99th and one like my DD at the 99.9th across the board.
No way am I cognitively in her league, and I was more or less fine in 'regular' classrooms. With a few tweaks, that is.
Neither my DD nor myself were remotely happy in
undifferentiated environments, however, and this is not the case for someone like my DH, who is more along the lines of 95th percentiles in some areas and 97-99th in others.
Percentiles. Yes. Much more useful info. HTH.
