From many of your stories, it's obvious that some schools are misusing the CogAT as a gatekeeper test, and that is just a shame.
I do love the idea of CogAT being used as a screener to overcome teacher-bias about 'who needs more advanced work,' and the discrepancy check idea is laudable. Your school district seems amazing.
I wish there was a 'wall of shame' somewhere on the CogAT site where school districts who were mis-using the test could be reported and someone from the publisher would send them angry letters...afterall, those districts are detracting from the reputation of these 'group ability tests.'
80% is a sort of interesting number, as I wonder what the correlation between straight up achievement tests and out of level tests are. This seems like really important information that would help school make researched based decisions on their gifted program entry procedures. Of course many school folks don't like individual IQ test scores - they just don't seem to 'square' with what a child 'looks like' in the classroom. Which might tell us a lot about our classrooms, or maybe something about IQ tests. Or just the difference between 1st graders and 10th graders. Lots to think about here.
And excellent point about having a 80% agreement over the thick part of the bell curve doesn't say anything about what's going on at +2SD and +3SD.
So hard to not assume that one.
Smiles,
Grinity
