For us, the only point in numerical values would be to remove barriers to entry into appropriate educational/cognitive activities.
DD is one of the rare individuals in our families who has not been tested. The rest of us are a variety of flavors of "gifted" as noted, and most of the older generation were evaluated at one time or another with SB-LM. I mention that because of the higher range on that one, and the fact that this gives us a wider set of data to draw from in understanding how temperment/personality (which are also somewhat heritable) play alongside of the numbers in order to produce a whole which is more than the sum of its parts, so to speak.
That said, it's really clear that there is a continuum of cognitive ability in our extended families (all four of them, I mean-- DH's and mine)-- and we had a very good basis for understanding DD's likely educational needs
without having "the number" for her in particular.
I sometimes feel a little bit defensive about our decision to not test DD. The world tends to see us as TigerParents from hell when they look at how we've parented her, and her achievements (that is, we have high expectations, and she very definitely has perfectionism problems, but those two things are not at all what they appear on the surface). I'm sure that there are those who (on the other hand) doubt that it's really her doing what she does, and that we are somehow hothousing our way to a child that
looks PG, for reasons all our own.
We're not, and I'm okay with all of that. Part of our reasoning in NOT having the number is that pretty much no good can come of it in our opinion. Either it's what we think, in which case-- well and good, but why did we need the validation since it doesn't gain us anything? Or perhaps it's higher than we think, in which case-- well, it still wouldn't change where we live or our other limitations in what is possible for her personally, and it WOULD draw unwanted attention and expectations/pressure from anyone that learned about the value. (My dad-- the person in both families that she most resembles, faced this problem all his life, and it had a horrible impact on him to be a sideshow freak.) OR-- it is lower than we think, in which case we get to spend a long time chasing why we have a value that nobody who knows our DD can seriously believe is correct. She can be capricious and oppositional, and given what we already know about her, she could potentially fool an unwary or inexperienced tester.
In short, I agree strongly with both Val and Tigerle. It is just a set of numbers, and it's not a perfect proxy for what it is attempting to measure. I'm not at all against such evaluations in practice or in principal-- and I'm also completely okay with the idea that for some kids at very high LOG, it's
so obvious what they are that it's not really necessary. We were rather fortunate in that our daughter seems to be one of them.
Achievement level alone has unlocked every door that DD wanted opened to her.
Those that would have required testing for access were also the things that we felt she probably lacked the maturity for in other ways (asynchrony), so they didn't matter much to us.
A different family might have needed the numbers, or maybe just wanted them. We might have, too, but for our circumstances being what they are/were. We've also learned to consider the consequences of having numbers versus not knowing them, too. I used to think that more numbers was
always a good thing. But I learned that not all numbers are usable data, and those that aren't just diminish your quality of life along the way. Philosophical of me, I suppose.
