Hi everyone,

I am a new poster to the board though I have been reading the board for a couple of years. Everyone has such great insight!

I am just curious if anyone else's child scored in the gifted range on the WISC but did not do that well on the SCAT?

My 8 year old son recently completed second grade and his teacher recommended the CTY online program so we had him take the SCAT to see if he qualified. He scored in the 45% for verbal and 59% for quantitative. So he did not qualify in either area.

His FSIQ on the WISC IV when he took it was 141.

The CTY program looked a little pricey for us so not sure if we would have actually participated, but I found the difference in scores a little perplexing.

I have to say I was very proud him for how he did as it was a little bit intimidating for him taking a test with all adults around :-)

But I am curious as to the difference between the two tests..I would think most gifted children would get qualifying scores on the SCAT? I am just wondering if this has been anyone else's experience.

Thanks!

Bump

Is it possible he had trouble with the bubble answer sheet (assuming the SCAT has that)? Or could he possibly have not understood what he was supposed to do?

If the scores don't correspond to what you know about your child then there's something wrong with the scores.

I would put more faith in the WISC scores. That SCAT is an odd test. My DYS dd did very well on the SCAT, but I have heard stories on this board similar to yours -- where they don't match. I wonder about anxiety. You can take the test again, right? It may not be worth it if you aren't going to use the programs.

Our son did quite well on the SCAT the first time (4th/5th Grade) -- in line with our expectations -- and qualified for CTY programs (95% in math).

He took it again last year to qualify for the next level of CTY summer program and scored considerably lower -- especially on the math portion (63% in math) and failed to qualify.

As it turns out, the real issue was not a lack of understanding -- he is just not focused enough on accuracy during testing.

For the SCAT math in particular, when he was finished, I took a peek at his scratch paper (provided by testing site) and it was essentially blank. He felt he could do everything in his head... and his score showed how wrong he was!

We've been working on "test-taking" the last few months and he's definitely upped his game, although nowhere near where it could/should be.

In reviewing his tests & quizzes for the last several months, all mistakes (except one) were careless. He knows the material inside & out and when forced to take his time + show all the steps, he nails it. But as a test-taker, he is still developing.

He took the SAT at the beginning of June and hit the necessary marks -- so at least the CTY qualification is behind him.

--

ALSO... maybe he could try re-testing on the SCAT? Or take the STB or one of the other tests offered through JHU?

One of the differences between the WISC and the SCAT is how it's administered - the WISC is typically administered by a psychologist 1-on-1, so that a child is going to have a bit of a touchstone for focusing. The SCAT, if it's administered everywhere as it is here, is taken on a computer in a testing center, and the child has no prompting or encouragement or whatever from anyone to pay attention, or to not fly through or to not stop at some point if they simply feel like stopping or not answering a question. At 8 years old, most kids haven't had any coaching in how to take tests like this either, so he might not have thought to go back and check his work or to leave a problem he didn't understand until last and then go back and try it again, things like that. I'd ask him if he remembers if he ran out of time before he answered all the questions.

I *don't* know how ability as measured by IQ correlates with SCAT scores - IQ tests are typically normed by age, and the SCAT is measured against above-grade-level students. MY EG ds had SCAT scores that are in line with his WISC/etc, but my younger dd who isn't quite as EG basically bombed the SCAT. OTOH, she took the test when she was in 2nd grade, and as time has gone by, she's shown to be very scattered with test performance - which in her case may be related to a reading challenge.

Another thing I wonder about - were your ds' WISC subtest scores even across the board, or was there a lot of variation? If there was significant variation in his scores, it's possible an area of relative weakness might have impacted the SCAT score.

I would have him retake the SCAT whether or not you care about signing him up for CTY courses if you don't mind paying for it again, and talk to him first about being careful to pay attention to detail or be sure to answer all the questions etc - things like that, *if* you think the difference in scores might just be due to inexperience with standardized testing. It's a relatively inexpensive test, so it can be a good opportunity to practice test taking skills.

Best wishes,

polarbear

SCAT is a very, very weird test. It's like nothing your child has likely ever seen before. The Language is all analogies and the math is all choosing whether a or b is bigger, or c if they are the same. It's not really comparable to the WISC, or even WIAT.

Add in the computer testing center and you have a particularly strange dynamic. My son was there on MCAT day. Lots of 20somethings whispering about Doogie Houser there. They had no idea people are taking different tests. My son thought it was cool, but I can see that other kids would be very uncomfortable with it! He also put on headphones so that he couldn't hear the people around him typing frantically as they wrote essays.

I was looking through the CTY stuff. I'm not able to find any reference to percentile requirements on the eligibility page for CTY Online. It shows qualifying scores.

http://cty.jhu.edu/ctyonline/apply/eligibility.html#EligiblityGuidelines

I think the percentile reported also depends on whether it is reporting from the above grade level norms or comparing to his grade group. In either case the percent has a completely different meaning than a percentile score on an IQ test (which is based on the population of testers at your kid's age.)

If you are looking at a percentile for above grade, then you need to take the raw score itself (something in the 400s range) and compare it to a chart to get the percent amongst other kids the same grade who also are likely gifted and took the same test. Taking the percent reported in the OP for math (59%) and looking at the Grade 2 boys chart for 2012 ( http://cty.jhu.edu/talent/docs/test%20data%20scat/2012SCAT.pdf ) I see that corresponds to about a 435 which is the eligibility score listed for math on the CTY Online link.

Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to respond!

I do think my son was a bit anxious and uncomfortable testing surrounded by adults, so I am sure that did impact his scores in some way. But I was still surprised especially in math that he did not do better. According to his MAP Scores he is at about a 6th grade level. He is not as strong verbally maybe only 1-2 years ahead.

Polarbear, his scores were pretty consistent across the WISC within each section though overall his PRI was 14 points higher than his VCI. This was also true when he took the CogAT; quantitative and nonverbal were higher than verbal. He is more gifted visually and spatially . I believe his verbal on the WISC was 96% while his PRI was 99.7% I now most gifted children tend to be more verbally gifted? Or those are the ones I tend to see at school in his gifted pull-out program.

His WIAT scores were also fairly consistent though he was lower on the fluency sections but overall his score was close to his IQ at 139.

The tester who administered the WISC also said that my son liked to take his time and really figure things out and that timed tests may not be a good indicator of his ability and I need to tell that to his teachers. So that could have been at play when he took the SCAT as well. He did say he had 1 minute left when he completed the quantitative section and I have a feeling the timer was stressful for him.

Thank you Zen Scanner for the link. I was a bit off on the percentiles I posted I think but his scaled scores were 424 verbal and 434 quantitative. If I am reading it correctly on the CTY site he missed the quantitative by 1 point.

It may be worth having him retake it since he was close on math and is now familiar with the environment. He had never seen analogies before and I am sure that stumped him a bit. He also does all his math in his head like Dandy's son and he can make careless mistakes as well when he does not reread and take his time.

I really appreciate all the input!!

My daughter took the intermediate SCAT (4-5 grade) a week back and she is confident that she did quite well. I am awaiting her score report which will be available soon.

On thing that helped her boost her confidence was a lot of practice on SCAT type questions. We enrolled her with one tutoring company top-grader and their tutors seemed to have a good hang of the test format and comparison question types, the ones tested on the SCAT. There are a few sample tests on their website - www.top-grader.com. Hope this helps..

My son took the SCAT three times (age 7 and 8) because he didn't qualify in math and wanted to take a science course. He qualified in language each time, but his scores on both tests were all over the place, once getting 70th percentile (or something, I don't remember the actual cutoffs), once 96th and so on. It made me very skeptical of the value of the tests and whether they actually measure anything significant. He wanted to do a camp near his grandmother, so he wanted to qualify, but I don't think much of the whole thing if you don't intend to do the programs.

BTW, he also was more concerned with not finishing, so whipped through the math and didn't use the scratch paper and was intimidated by the MCAT students - all that is in play as well.