Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Woohoo, she passed!

DD7 took the proficiency exam for 2nd grade math, reading, and language arts today. She needed a 90 to get a subject acceleration in each area, and a 90 in both math and reading averaged with lang arts to be allowed to test for science and social studies (where a 90 on both would result in a full grade skip to 3rd).

I spent the afternoon worrying that she'd pass reading and language arts, but not math, which would have been a poor placement for her. (She asked to skip specifically to get harder math, but math is generally her weaker subject.) As it happened, she got a 92 on each.

Since she passed both, no matter what the result is in the minor-subject tests, she'll get a placement that's good for her. Her preference is for a placement in 2nd with subject acceleration for math, reading, and language arts. As parents, we prefer a full grade skip (which is what I think she's likely to get, in any case). Her hesitation is entirely social, and I think she'll do better socially in the long run (beyond the first 2 weeks of school) with the full skip.

I will say that the tests (as far as I can tell) are not what I expected at all. DD reports that she was allowed to use a calculator for most of the math test (and I did see her using a calculator), and that they asked absolutely nothing about several of the topics specifically mentioned in the standards (like the parts of a friendly letter). DD commented that she did well on the test because she went into it without any expectation of what it would be like, and described the testing as both easy and fun.

Our district has ~16,000 kids K-4 to 12th, so maybe 13,500 in the grades likely to test. They have two testing dates a year, of which this was one. There were 4 kids testing today, including DD. So testing for an acceleration / skip really is quite rare in our district.

YAY!!

How awesome for you and your daughter! Great news!!!

YAY! Congrats!

I am surprised they let a calculator be used for material at this age?! WOW! Crazy!

Woo hoo! Awesome!

Yeah, we really boggled over that for a while. As best as we can tell, the purpose of the calculator was to test understanding of concepts without careless errors as a confound. So she didn't get to use a calculator for the "choose the correct operation," portion, for instance.

She's still young enough to be an unreliable reporter ("Did they ask you about capitalization?" "No, they didn't ask anything about that. They gave me a bunch of sentences, and I had to pick the one that was right, and it was the one that started with a capital letter."), so it's not entirely clear to me what the nature of the calculator-allowed items was.

Hahaha! That's cute about the capilization thing!

I guess that makes sense about the reasoning for the calculator but at the same time, just a little surprising to me!

Well, the important thing is she passed and WOOHOO! That's worth celebrating

That does seem very likely to be true. I also think full skips call less attention to a kid than subjects acceleration - which can be a pro or a con depending on the kid. Of course some kids need both full and subject skips...

I wonder how the other 3 kids did. Gradeskips may be rare in your district, but they are much much less rare than our district (1/3 years!)

Yippee!

Due to some indiscretion on the part of my MIL, DD was aware that she'd be allowed to test for a potential skip during the last few days of her 1st grade year. And a 6yo has no discretion for exciting news, so all of her friends heard about it - and they reacted very negatively, saying that skipping was "cheating" and "not fair." I think that a subject acceleration that kept her with those same kids would be a worse social position than a skip that put her with entirely different kids. (Which is consistent with what I've heard anecdotally, that the left-behind kids are a much bigger problem than the higher-grade kids.)


For a similar district size? I wasn't surprised by the absolute numbers, so much as the infinitesimal portion of the student body. I got the impression last year that full-grade skips are quite rare (particularly as you go up in grades) but that subject acceleration in the older grades wasn't nearly as rare.

The other kids testing were two middle-school aged boys (who I believe were testing for individual subjects, not an entire grade), and a high-school aged girl who had "more tests than anyone else." I wonder if she was a homeschooler (or partial homeschooler) who was testing in order to get formal credit for the work she'd done - the testing isn't just to get a grade skip, but to get transcript credit for work not done through normal district-offered classes. For instance, if DD later did Algebra I as a summer program through Duke TIP, she'd have to test through the district both to get transcript credit towards graduation and to be allowed to enroll in Algebra II.