My DD took the CogAT in kindergarten and her scores were around the 90th or 95th percentile but I was never given a report or shown specifics. I was told that her highest score was in non-verbal ability and lowest in verbal. Whatever the scores were the district was happy enough with them that they grade accelerated her to first grade (achievement testing in math and reading was also done). A little over a year later she had to take the CogAT again as part of the gifted screening process. I don't think the kindergarten version was timed and it was given to her one-one-one. But this next one was a group test and it was timed. Her scores ranged from around the 60th percentile for her age for math to the 97th percentile for verbal. I looked at the report and could see that for the quant and non-verbal sections, she left a large percentage of problems blank. She just ran out of time. But the district scored the test anyway. Her scores weren't nearly high enough for the school for highly gifted so I took her to a private psych to do the WISC IV. That showed her non-verbal and verbal composite to be over the 99.9th percentile. Her verbal score was actually much lower than non-verbal, the opposite of the second CogAT (same as the first). I would not take the CogAT at face value. If you suspect she is gifted, take her for private testing or see if the school psych will give her an IQ test. You could ask for the WASI, it is much shorter than the WISC. Or ask for just the perceptual reasoning and verbal portions of the WISC to get a General Ability Index. The other 2 secitons of the WISC (working memory and processing speed) don't correlate at all with reasoning ability, which is what schools want for gifted programs.
