Oh, and not to downplay your son's phenomenal performance in any way, but I've found it very disturbing how quickly grade level "norms" drop in the middle school plus years. Maybe that's not worded right....perhaps "how little DS's scores drop" if extended out. I noticed this after he took the middle school level SCAT. His 8th grade norms were not much lower than his 6th grade norms.
Oh, Dottie, don't worry--I was never attached to those scores. There are so many things wrong with the questions themselves, how they are tied to grade level, and how they advance to the next question, I have always taken them with a grain of salt. I know for a fact that when DS scored proficient for 10th in math as a 3rd grader, he really did not know how to do long division, but he could eliminate a few obviously wrong answers and then take a good guess.
But I they do 3 good things for us: 1) the school takes notice of them 2)they woke me up to the fact that DS was beyond MG and 3) DS absolutely loves these tests, especially the fully adaptive fall ones where it looks like he gets college level questions. The 6-9 days a year he tests are the happiest of his school life--I would never take that away from him, even if the scores themselves don't tell us much.
DS will take the ACT in February. This is the test I expect to give me a more accurate sense of where he is. On his practice, he got scores that were dead average for the entering freshman class at a nearby mid-tier college.
