Interesting Belin-Blank presentation on use of CogAT and ITBS in gifted selection process (cut & paste into search engine). Doesn't recommend using the CogAT composite score, but the Verbal paired with Reading, and the QN paired with Mathematics:
faculty.education.uiowa.edu/docs/dlohman/icn_full_day_using_cogat.ppt?
This appears to be what my district is doing, only they are not taking averages, like averaging the verbal CogAT and the Reading achievement, and then averaging the quant CogAT and Math Achievement. They want ALL of the scores to be above the 98th percentile. If they have enough spaces open for the highly gifted program then they will take EITHER quant/math or verbal/reading, but still, both scores in each category need to be above 98th percentile. So someone could be a math genius with achievement scores at 99.9th percentile but make a few careless errors on the CogAT and not qualify for gifted services.
