And yes, a lot depends on the clinical skills of the evaluator, which is, of course, why in-person one-to-one assessment is still considered the gold standard.
One of the things that is so tricky about this, is that I now know we should never have been allowed in the room when during the testing with that first psychologist. But had I not been, I would not have been aware of SO many red flags (which were confirmed by her report). She seemed quite unaware of the ways she was impacting my child's mood and behavior. Had completely forgotten various events. One subtest my child had completed the entire subtest perfectly in the allocated time. She actually said out loud "I've never seen that before!". Which was a worry in itself, on multiple levels. But also, when the report came and the score for that subtest was 17, I was curious. I called and asked, she had no memory of any of it until prompted (but did then recall, and so was curious herself and went and looked it up, and confirmed that it had been a "perfect" score, but was scaled due to age). This seems like an appropriate time to note in the report that a 17 was the ceiling score due to age (I have various other reports with notes of precisely this nature).
Because I had inappropriately been allowed to sit in the room, I was very certain we needed to try again with someone more experienced with gifted children.
(Now ask me how my profession feels about developments in assessment practices resulting from the advent of remote learning!)
Just last night I was discussing with my child's psychologist how worried everyone had been about therapy by zoom/skype etc, but how wonderful they had found it. That there had been so much benefit from seeing the child in their own environment. But we did discuss that testing was obviously very tricky remotely!
