I do have a child who looks "more gifted" in real life than she did on a test, but I don't even know what I attribute this to and I'm not sure it should matter. Her needs outpace the scores she got. Let's see where she can go with it, is my feeling. Now, I haven't yet had a kid who is the other way around (scores outpace what we see in real life), so I don't know how that would change my opinion. But it seems to me that if we drew a general net and got the top, say, 10%, we could then do beautifully if we gave all those kids a lot of different opportunities and saw how they did.
I have one of each. I get frequent comments about dd13 -- how out different she is, how she seems so much older than she is, etc. On paper she straddles the bar on IQ right btwn MG and HG. She's easily HG+ in my mind and has performed academically as such but she's not DYS level gifted.
Dd11, on the other hand, does have DYS level IQ scores but doesn't look like it often and her achievement scores are all over the place. Then again, she is 2e...
I guess that what I don't see happening in practice is what a lot of you mention here: varied services w/in the GT programming we have. At best, some areas (not mine) in bigger cities have HG programs like Denver or Seattle and those take kids who are at a 98th percentile composite point. There is still a lot of variation there in LOG when you are looking @ 98th+.
Locally, they don't even go that far. Kids with 95th percentile achievement in any one area are lumped in with globally gifted PG kids. The only differentiation we've seen is the ability to subject accelerate two years in math for kids who are really quite gifted in that one area. And then, of course, grade skips. Dd13 wound up going the grade skip route b/c the general GT lumping really wasn't a fit for her.
