Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment CoGAT Composite Score calculation?

My DS recently had CoGAT testing for admission into our school's GT program. Apparently the test was graded in-house versus being sent out and the only results we were given are:

V: 95
NV: 93
Q: 95
COMP: 95

Given that all 3 sections were reasonably high, I would have expected the composite score to be higher than it is. Am I wrong? Anyone know how the composite score is calculated exactly?

Unfortunately, I do not have the raw scores and the district is not interested in providing any more information than the above 4 numbers <sigh>.

Actually, he is on the young side for his grade. His birthday is in about a month.

It bugs me that the composite is lower than I would expect and the school isn't willing to provide any more details on the scoring.

I don't know if I should push this issue or not, which is why I'm wondering if we can definitively say the composite score must not be valid somehow. FYI, if the composite was 97 or higher, then he qualifies for the next round of testing.

My DS is a year younger or more than his classmates. In the 3rd grade the age based composite was about 3% higher for him than his grade based composite. Our school never gives more than the percentiles and composite. They do provided us with both age and grade numbers. I hate when schools use one number as the evidence of what anyone child needs. Do you have any other testing to maybe counter this result with the school? Did they do IBTS at the same time or some other achievement test? Our school does them together. They once tried to use a 15 question math quiz for his placement. He missed the cut by one point on that quiz, despite hitting the ceiling on his IBST and state proficiency testing. I bought his test scores into the Math coordinator before school started the following year. She took one look at his scores and skipped him up to the next grade. His average in the class this year has been 108.4% This summer I'm going to bring in his grades from this year, his Explore test results, state test and ask for another skip. Sometimes it's finding the right person to approach and having the preponderance of the evidence of your side.

Thanks so much for looking at this, Dottie. You are an incredible help here on the forum as always.

FYI, the scoring results (which were hand-written) for the sections all say they are National Age Percentile Rank.

I don't know if this will help. Here are some old CogAt scores I have lying around.

99/89/91 Composite 97

92/97/87 Composite 95

84/88/92 Composite 91

83/81/92 Composite 87