Saw this on another site about testing with a private psychlogist vs. a school psychologist.

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Forgive the long post, but this is an issue near and dear to my heart. I am a private psychologist and part of my practice is conducting evaluations of children to see if they qualify for gifted education. My posting is just to offer a word of caution for parents based on my own personal experience with having my child tested by a school psychologist for gifted education. Here's the story: My oldest daughter was referred for gifted testing in 1st grade. At the time, I saw no problem with having the school psychologist conduct the testing. After all, as you say in the article, it was free. However, I would not do it again. The school psychologist kept my then 6 year old in the testing room doing testing for two hours without a break. I knew from experience that it was too long; children that young, even though they may be very bright, don't have the attention span or concentration to focus for two hours of testing without a break. The proper procedure with young children, since gifted children take longer to get through each test than average children, is to take a break or schedule the testing over two days. So I knew it was too long for them to be in there, but I didn't want to knock on the door because many of the tests are timed and I didn't want to "spoil" the results. When the psychologist and my daughter finally came out of the testing room, my daughter looked wiped out (as would be expected) and the psychologist, seemingly clueless, was smiling. She announced, "Your daughter sort of gave up on the last couple of tests, gave me a lot of "I don't know"s, but she did so well on the other tests that her overall score is high enough to get into the gifted program." Gave up? I thought. How about you messed up! She needed a break! I took the psychologist to the side and asked why she didn't give her a break or break the testing up into two days when it was obvious she was losing her attention on the last three or four tests. Her answer was that she had too many students to test to do that. End result - my daughter was placed into the gifted program, but I had her tested again a year later by a private psychologist to see what her true IQ was and the score was 24 points higher than the school psychologist's score. Bottom line - had my daughter's true IQ not been in the high 150 range (which is very rare - most gifted children's IQs are in the 130s), she would not have survived the school psychologists' ignorance or incompetence - I'm not sure which it was - and she would not have been placed in a gifted program - not because she wasn't gifted, but because the testing wasn't done properly. I am confident not all psychologists who work for the school system are like the one I encountered, but my cautionary statement is - be careful. Do your homework. Know what the proper procedures are for testing gifted children and make sure as much as you can that those procedures are followed. My second child was recommended for gifted testing in 2nd grade and I declined having her tested through the school, I went with private testing. The piece of mind that the testing was being done properly was well worth the money..Posted By: sbcarter on Jan 12 2010 - 11:01:00 AM