IQ score becomes a barometer for so many opportunities but what does it really get you? More importantly what is the IQ score that translates to a defined success in the eyes of people in these coveted programs? What other variables outweigh these IQ scores but never get considered resulting in a child being rejected from a gifted program?
Let's take the Davidson program for example. The bar is set at 145. I see a lot of people post and their kids are just missing it. Mine certainly did according to the score. Is the bar wrong? Why 145 and not 135 or 115?
My son will start GA Tech this summer as a Junior at age 14. He is a white male with no hooks to this elite school and got a 1450 SAT with no preparation/study courses.
He took the WISC-V around age 7 and scored a 124. Nothing ground shattering but he is clearly smart. This is not considered highly gifted at least according to programs like Davidson but I struggle to see kids achieving more at such a young age than my son has. I would love to make sense of this because I have three other kids behind him.
A bit more on my son. He was at grade level till grade 5 (because the public school told us he was smart but not that smart...just an excuse) and we supplemented at home in math allowing him to accelerate at his pace. He read sometimes 2-3 books a day on the weekends between sporting events. He then went to a gifted private school for 6th where they immediately grade skipped, course accelerated, doubled the normal number of courses until he found a hint of challenge, etc. He still got all A's. This resulted in completing 6-12th grades + 2 years of college (dual enrollment) in 4 years. He was overdue and very bored up until this point. He is very driven, self sufficient and a very normal 14 year old boy. He plays at a high level travel ice hockey with age related peers so that he doesn't miss his teenage years completely by attending college early.
I am not up on any of the data but hoping this group can shed some light. Why would my son be excluded from a program like Davidson and yet achieve these kind of results? What type of IQ score correlates to a child requiring more acceleration like my son experienced despite a modestly high IQ score? Is my son an outlier in what he accomplished given a 124 IQ score or is this common? What does a score of 145 translate to in the real world or not?
