It's always annoyed me immensely with CTY courses, especially as a non US family, our age/grade correlations are not necessarily the same. And my interactions with CTY lead me to believe that this approach isn't about acceleration anyway (which you would hope an organization that exists for gifted kids would be considering), it's about slight variations in age / grade.
When faced with enrolling our child into a course, for which their CTY teacher (from a related course they were finishing) had recommended them as ready for and likely to delight in, they were knocked back due to age, not grade. Or rather we were told it was grade, but the grade the child should have been in was what counted in that instance.
And SET is AGE for taking the SAT, not grade. They do know that age matters, but they're assuming only slight fuzziness in grades and (presumably) trying to accommodate what has been taught as a result.
