Don't worry about the CogAT based on what I said!!! Lots of kids do very well on it, it's just the nature of the test that some gifted kids don't score as highly on it as they do on other ability tests. I remember riding home from the test with my ds and he was telling me all about it and he was very proud about how he figured out some of the answers, and when he told me some of the questions that were about things he'd never heard of before he described in great detail the logic he used to answer the question and I knew right then and there that his brain was most likely working in a different plane than the folks who wrote the test were expecting!
CogAT is also a learned ability test, not an innate ability test like the WISC etc.
Would it be possible that child's IQ declines as they grow up? He does seem to show more giftedness when he was younger...
IQs don't decline, (until we get really old like me lol!)... but I do think they can go underground. When our kids are *really* little and they talk to adults in particular, they sound so incredibly smart compared to other kids their age. Adults who didn't know my ds used to do a double-take when he started talking about things he liked to talk about because it was pretty obvious from the way he talked he was super-smart. He also used to have tons of questions he'd just blurt out all the time. After he went to school, he asked fewer questions out loud and he started seeming to talk more like his peers just in general - I suspect it was a combination of sitting in boring school for 6 hours a day where you can't talk much along with being surrounded by other kids and listening to them talk... he just no longer seemed to spontaneously sound all that unusual... until you talk to him one on one or until he answers a tough question in class, things like that.
I'm sorry your ds didn't get into the school you were trying to test him into! But I'm guessing you'll find alternatives that are equally as good... while at the same time none of them are perfect...
Good luck!
polarbear
