Just wanted to chime in with my family's experience. Ds in second grade last year took the SCAT and qualified for math courses at CTY, but missed verbal qualification by one point. He was a very inexperienced test taker (attends progressive school where they never call anything a "test"), and he took his sweet time on all of it, finishing neither section (only got to mid thirties with each section I think). Even though he was only interested in summer camp programs for math/science, I thought we should have him try again on the verbal (without letting him know he had missed it by one point). So he took it again fairly late in the season (May I think) and this time I told him "try to work faster, see if you can finish!" On the second go-round his verbal score was substantially higher than math, and he was recognized for his high scores at one of the CTY award ceremonies. I thought it was interesting that the verbal score in particular jumped so much when he made the effort to finish. So, if your child did not finish and just missed the cutoff, I would recommend having the child try again. For my ds it is all good practice. We seem to have an issue with inconsistent performance in general, and we are trying to figure that out (which is another story). But in the meantime I am delighted ds has qualified for all the programs for his age group at CTY. This summer he will do a program "inventions" and he is really looking forward to it.
