My 10 year old, 5th grader dd took the SCAT last week, and I just checked online and she qualified for the summer courses in both math and verbal (95 and 96 percentile respectively). These scores are normed against 8th graders it seems.

Has anyone here sent their child to one of the summer programs? They are 3 weeks long, and quite expensive. Not sure if it is worth it.

Also, what are the awards ceremonies like?

Thanks for any info!

Hi Nutmeg- just wanted to say that there are old threads here that discuss both of your questions; I think the one about awards ceremonies is rather old, perhaps 1-2 years.

I can share our brief experience, which probably won't be of much help. Our two kids got similar scores to yours but were slightly younger at the time. We opted not to do the summer camps for various reasons. Regarding the awards ceremony, I think it really depends. They are regional, and from what I remember reading here, seemed to vary in how well they were done. We ended up attending, but in the end did not find it to be worth the effort (travel of about two hours during snowy winter, long ceremony with speaker not tuned in to a young audience and difficult to understand, there seemed to be a lot of self-promotion by the university hosting, which was not particularly close to us and therefore not of much interest at that point, etc).

I think there are a few reasons some find it valuable- the public acknowledgement of achievement can be important to kids, and the ceremony includes a program with the names and schools of all the invitees, which can potentially facilitate relationships with other bright kids. I imagine if you or your kids are interested in the university that is hosting that might be a reason to attend, especially if they offer programs for gifted youth.

Hope that helps.

The award ceremony isn't really a big deal. Personally, I wouldn't drive far for it. We were within a half hour and I had two kids so we went. They had a couple of speakers at the beginning followed by calling the kids by name to go onto the stage to get their certificates. Some of the kids really dressed up but I had to scrunged up clean clothes for mine since we had just flown back into town very late the night before after a long trip. Some of the parents also filmed everything, but there were others like me who didn't even bother with a photo.

Thanks for the input. I think there will be an award ceremony about half an hour away, so we will probably go to check it out.

I wish they had residential programs that were only for a week. 3 weeks is too long for a 10 year old!

Ended up going to the award ceremony this weekend. It was only a 35-40 minute drive. As the other posters noted before, it is not a big deal. Kids were called up individually and given a pin, and we got the program with the names and schools of the invitees. Probably would not go again.