It is totally normal to be nervous! I think for me I was concerned that we were paying all this money and I wondered if I would feel like an idiot if my suspicions were not confirmed. We had also asked our psychologist to look out for ADHD so that was another concern.
Let me reassure you about the skills of the psychologists though. My son was tested a few weeks before his fifth birthday. He is a very strong-willed, intense, opinionated child. If the psychologist you have chosen is experienced with gifted children, then she will use all kinds of "tricks of the trade" to get him to perform his best. One "trick" my psychologist used was to let me stay in the room. I did not really want to be here, but she asked DS if that would make him feel more comfortable and--of course--he said yes! So, I also got to see some of the other things she did to get him to answer questions.
My son is a goofball, and for some of the "easy" questions, he would answer with an off-the-wall answer just to be silly. She said to him, "imagine I'm an alien from another planet and I've never heard these things--even if they seem 'easy peasy' to everyone else." That helped a lot. On the flip side, my son is also an extreme perfectionist. So, when she asked him something and he wasn't quite sure, he would clam up even if I knew he knew it. So, she would try to tease answers out of him and did a pretty good job. She said things like, "I'm going to ask you a hard question, and you have to try to answer it even if it makes you stretch your brain. Then you can ask me a hard question." So, she asked hers and then he asked his--his were things like "What makes us alive? How do humans make metal? What makes plants grow?" She joked that he REALLY wasn't going to let her off easy! It took longer to test him (almost 2 hours!), but I could tell that the psychologist was really committed to getting a good picture of my child.
In the end, I think a good psychologist will use lots of tools from her bag of tricks and then will also know if she didn't get an entirely accurate score. In my son's report, she wrote "test results are a considered a minimal estimate due to child's extreme perfectionism and hesitancy to take risks--risk taking improves overall scores and processing speed."
Hopefully, it will be a good experience and you will at least get some good information to support your mommy gut!
