I tutored in a school last year (different district) and the district used the Naglieri Nonverbal ability Test (not sure if I'm spelling that correctly). Anyway, I had some spare time on my hands and the gifted teacher gave me the kids score sheets and asked me to figure out exactly how old they were at the time they took the test. She had asked each kid to report their date of birth on the top of the test. Then, she was going to figure out their score by taking their age and looking in the score booklet. The tests were completely hand-scored. She had done about 20 or 30 ages on the tests already. She had one kid off by 2 years, putting him 2 years older than he actually was! There were several other discrepancies like that. It is very easy to make a mistake if you are looking at dozens of tests, and you are trying to score them in your free time with lots of interruptions. It requires a certain amount of intelligence on the part of the scorer. Say you know the date of the test was 2-13-2013 and the kids' date of birth 5-09-2005 so how many years, months and days old were they when they took the test? The test scorer's skill (or intelligence? :)) in "coding" and "arithmetic" (among other things, probably) is important in terms of figuring out which answers are right and wrong, marking it correctly, and then adding up the score. These were NOT computer generated score reports. I went through all of them that had already been done to make sure they had been done correctly in terms of calculating age, and made several changes (after computing and re-computing). When I showed the errors to the g/t lady and said she should double-check all the tests she just laughed--didn't seem too concerned.
I wondered about DD's CogAT score report and whether it was correct because she had been grade accelerated, so was the youngest in the grade, yet her age and grade percentiles were practically the same. But, I didn't want to look like a nut by questioning it, esp. if it HAD been scored correctly.
I would have wanted to slap her. I suppose at least she is not doing medical testing with that attitude.
