My dd took the Math Survey with Goals 2-5.
Is your friend questioning the score because her daughter hasn't had more advanced math (above grade level) and therefore she figures she couldn't have scored so high? Because in addition to what Zoey said about gifted kids being good test takers and eliminating wrong answers, some are really good at figuring out how to do things on their own without ever having been shown.
For example, when my daughter was in 1st grade, the school gave her achievement testing. One of the questions asked her to add two fractions with mixed denominators. We had never even introduced that idea to her. We weren't following any math program, we just did a lot of fractions with baking at home, so she knew that 3/4 + 3/4 = 1 1/2. That kind of thing. The psychologist showed us a scrap sheet dd had used to work out the problems and on the one where she had to add the mixed denominators (1/3 + 2/5), she started by drawing two pies. (I had shown her how to color in pie pieces to represent part of a whole). The psychologist said after studying them for a little, she started to draw more lines into her pie that had been divided into three pieces. She drew 4 more lines into each 1/3 piece, thereby creating 3 groups of 5 pieces, making 15 total. And then she shaded the additional 5ths to represent the other pie that she had superimposed on her 3rd pie. She figured out the concept of creating a common denominator, only she had never even heard of it before. So my point is, some of these kids just intuitively understand some of these math concepts, that they don't need instruction. When they are shown a problem they've never been presented with before, they are able to reason through them and come up with the right answer.
