Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources Practice Tests for Cogat - Grade2

My husband got this book from Amazon - '4 Practice Tests for Cogat'. It was only $26 and has tons of content for the Grade 2 Cogat testing in the format of the test. We have seen a bunch of books and this one is good. I recommend it. My daughter looks forward to working on it every morning.

Anyone knows if there are similar books for OLSAT?

I don't encourage 'practicing' for any test used similarly to an IQ test, because it makes it harder to compare 'apples to apples.' Not that I don't sympathise, because the Cogat and OLSAT can be very unfair to the very gifted kids they are screening for - and all kids deserve to get their academic needs met.

But still....
Grinity

There are several books and "prep bundles" on Amazon for the Cogat. I think it is inevitable that if a test is used to decide something parents think is important, they will prepare their children for the test. The SAT is useful even though there is much more preparation material available now than 40 years ago. Ideally other tests used for selection would be similarly robust.

I think there is an additional problem of schools not being challenging enough for most kids, and many available GT offerings are probably beneficial to lots of kids, whether or not they would pass the CogAT without prepping. If a little prepping will lead to an adequate education, where otherwise it might be underwhelming, then in that situation I say go for it.

Also, I imagine if my kid were not a good test taker, I have a feeling I would want to help him out by familiarizing him with the types of things that might be on a test. Since I don't have that issue, and my kid scores super high on every test he's taken, I cannot fault others for their choices.

It would be nice if all the kids were in the same boat with these tests, starting with no prep so you could get a fairly good apples to apples comparison, but in reality it ain't gonna happen.

I've done a lot of strange things for parenting ....even help my son cheat at video games. I don't question an individual parents individual decision on CoGat especially since it is widely so misused....but I does give me a creepy feeling to see it talked about here.

I think it is ok that some things we do but don't talk about. It raises the bar on how desperate we have to feel to do them and that can be very useful.

If the line isn't here then where is it?
Love and more love
Grinity

I know we disagree on this but the SAT is currently an achievement test and has been for many years. The custom in the US is currently to study for the SAT and the publishers of the test are in the test prep business as well. When the publishers of CoGat publish test prep books and post them on their website Ill know that things have changed.

I don't think that you want to encourage testmakers to be as tricky as the SAT writers particularly with elementary school age kids.

That robustness comes with a high cost both literally in test design and in oddness of the test.

Love and more Love
Grinity

I would make the law the line. Psychologists are strictly prohibited from divulging the questions on IQ tests, so I would not try to get a peek. If Cogat books are sold openly on Amazon, they must not be giving away confidential material, and I would not feel guilty about using them.

There are lots and lots of prep books out there for the SAT, for high school. That is why there are so many perfect SAT scores today. That is why Mensa doesn't accept the SAT score anymore.
I used to teach Kaplan courses many years ago for SAT, ACT, and later MCAT. My experience was that you could increase your scores 100-200 (or perhaps more), on a total of 1600, by taking a prep course.
I remember one time, a student chatted with me at the break. "The math is so hard!" she said to me. "yes, I said, but you can study and get better." "I've never had geometry and it's hard," she told me.
I thought, what kind of high school are you going to where you haven't had geometry by 11th grade? "Oh," she said, "I'm only ten!" I looked closely at her and realized she did look very young and she had a Hello Kitty pencil box! I guess she was prepping for the SAT for the Hopkins program or something.
Now THAT I thought wasn't appropriate.

I guess that's why I wouldn't use the 'what is legal' approach here. Both talent search testing and tests like the CogAT and OLSAT are used as aptitude or ability tests. While they aren't controlled tests like IQ tests, schools use them that way. I've known people who've crossed the line much more than buying practice tests (there are ways to get copies of the actual test).

I, too, understand the despiration especially as, like others have mentioned, what passes as GT placement is often something many kids could benefit from and which is not sufficient for kids who are gifted. As a parent of a 2e child who is a very out of the box thinker, a test like the CogAT was not in her benefit. Would I have prepped her to get a higher score so she'd be recognized as gifted? In hindsight, I still don't know that I would have. Why? Because the message it would give my daughter wouldn't be one I'd want to convey. I wouldn't want her to think that her scores on this one test were so important that she had to do everything she could to do well on it, that being called gifted by the schools was a status symbol... Part of this comes from the way gifted is treated in our local schools. It is treated as better. The kids who are in GT pull outs brag about it. The parents brag about it.

Instead of prepping dd (which might not have done much good anyway, to be honest), I took the route of arguing with the district about their policy and got them to change it. They wouldn't take dd's upper 140s WISC scores, but after getting an entire committee together to review dd's test scores, they now will take IQ scores. If the process is flawed, I'm more in favor of fighting to make it right than doing questionable things to fit within it although I certainly do understand the temptation.

Grinity, I agree with you in principal, and in fact when I didn't really know what I wanted to do in life, I took the LSAT without prep, thinking that if I didn't do well enough, maybe law school was not for me... (Stupid plan, as I did well enough to get in, but not well enough to get so many scholarships, which I likely could have done if I had studied!) But the fact remains that there never will really be a level playing field except maybe the very first time a different type of test comes out, where it's impossible to prep.

I think if the GT programs are worth it, and really are beneficial to the kids who need them, the parents who prep their kids to get into the program may have the plan backfire if their kids do not do so well once in the program. You want your kids to get a decent education, but you don't want to torture them with something that's too hard/too fast for them in reality. But I think the true GT programs are more rare (i.e., not just enrichment or methods of teaching that can benefit all kids). And this whole prepping thing will work itself out by locality.

Of course, the better practice to screen for GT is to consider several factors, not just one test that will not catch the kids whose parents haven't had a chance to prep them.....