Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Old news that's new to me: Justin Chapman

Thanks bluemagic.

There is one private school near us that does not do IQ testing. Instead, they screen parents for their SES, which just rubs me the wrong way and really makes SO angry so we never applied.

I don't mind that these schools screen kids by IQ but I do mind that so many families participate in the test prep madness. That puts the rest of us between a rock and a hard place. Looking at the prep materials available on amazon, I personally feel that is getting close to cheating but there are children who go to a prep center 3 days a week to study using such materials with a professional coach and I don't know if I'd be hurting DD's chance if I did nothing.

I think at the end of the day, I have to believe that the school knows what they are doing and if they think the school and DD are a good match, they'd offer her a spot.

DD's social skills with adults and age-peers are pretty good but compared to other precocious children who are 11 months older, she looks rather immature, which does put her at a disadvantage during the group interview part.

We did the critical thinking series because DS liked workbooks and playing school. It wasn't prepping in my mind as it was not geared toward the tests. Plus, the logic puzzles were interesting to DS. However what was prepping in my mind was sitting down and working. But we knew people who prepped the experience, basically getting the kid comfortable with going to a tester and answering questions. Not all kids will do it. But what I did do overtly was do a version of princeton review for my 4.5 year old - I taught him to look at all the answers before making a choice and if there were two close answers to try to figure out the difference between the two. We did that for OLSAT and bracken (he was before the switch to NNAT in nyc) and we looked at the sample test the nyc doe provides. Some argue that the posting of the sample means that preparing is recommended and encouraged, as opposed to iq tests.

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How do they do that? If you mean that they don't offer financial aid, it could just be that they don't have extra funds available.

This is all second-hand info so I'm not sure how much of that is true but what I hear is that they ask if one of the parents (and they really mean the mother) is available to volunteer in the classroom on a consistent basis. We live in a city where the cost of living is outrageously high so this is only possible if the breadwinner makes over $150,000 unless one wants to live on bread and water.

The interview process really focuses on the parents rather than the child. They want to know what kind of life style you have and ask questions to sort out who comes from old money. Again, second-hand story but a friend w/ a Ph.D in physics who is married to a MD tried out for this school and their PG+ child was rejected, not even wait-listed. Both parents went to public schools until college and made it on their own without much help from their middle-class parents. They live in a very exclusive residential area but they do not belong to a selective country club or own a cabin in Chamonix. The school is definitely looking for a certain type of family.

They offer generous financial aid and they do take a handful of children whose parents cannot afford to pay $21,000+ tuition so we could have gotten in as one of their FA cases* but I don't think we'd have felt very comfortable in this community.

* If we had applied and she was accepted, that is. SO most likely would have said something really abrasive to put them off.

One of the reasons I rejected the only "gifted" private school in my area when my son was entering K, is because what I was hearing from other parents was that it was really a school for rich parents who thought their kids were gifted.

And that supposedly if I could hold our horses, and suffer through public school K-3. Our local elementary had the BEST gifted program around for 4-6th, not that that program ended out working that well for my DS in the end.

In many ways, I think that describes many "gifted" private schools across the country including the ones we're applying to, unfortunately. I'd prefer to homeschool or start a coop but DD is adamant that she wants to go to school where she can eat lunch everyday with her friends.

I think that my NOT prepping DD for the school ability test, I really did her a disservice. If there is a 2e issue, or anything about the child that may cause an inaccurate result, the parent should prep in order to level playing field. Schools cannot be relied upon to do the right thing....they are just looking for data to plug into their formula or strict entrance cut-offs. I had to look closely at DD's score report to determine that she left a large number of items blank and this happened because it's a timed test and DD has slow processing speed and can be perfectionistic. She probably agonized over the answers to some of the questions and spent 5X the amount of time that she "should" have. If I had gotten her a prep test, I could have taught her how to pace herself. Another student we know who also took the test had the SAME problem. No one told us this was a timed test, so her parents told her to be careful and double check her answers. She left a lot of questions blank and scored low just like DD. The parents prepped her to take the test again the next year, and her composite score went up 30 or 35 points the second time around. I gave up on the test and took DD for private testing (WISC) which showed a very large discrepancy as well (like 30 points). If DS ends up taking the school test when he's old enough, now I know to prep him. No way am I going to let his 2e issues get in the way of doing well, and him potentially being denied services when he clearly needs them. We already have a WISC on him showing he's gifted but the district will most likely say it's too old and not done by the "right" person. Funny how they think the stupid CogAT would give them more accurate results than a WISC.

What could it possibly mean for it to have allowed you to exceed the best score possible for you?

I don't see a reason to prep for an IQ test, though perhaps you can explain to the kid that it is unlike other tests they have taken (more like games or puzzles).

For the SAT, it is different. I am in the process of trying to get middle kid to prep for the SAT. She took it once this past year, in 10th, just to see how she would do. While her score would get her into the vast majority of colleges in the US, she wants to apply to some very selective schools. All of these schools have very low admit rates, but it would help if she got to 2250+ instead of 2100+.

My youngest did not want to prep for the MAP test, though in our district, you need to score 96th+ percentile to get accelerated in math in 5th grade. So I just told her to slow down, don't rush and make stupid mistakes, use some reasoning on questions you don't fully understand, eliminate obvious wrong answers, etc.

I don't really consider that prep or hothousing (and just that 5 minute talk led to a 98th percentile score).

When you get your SAT scores, they also tell you for each section what the average score upon retaking was for people who made your score. So I know based on my eldest son's reports that people who get a 700 on the SAT math on average get a slightly lower score (maybe 690), and that people who score in the upper 700s lose more (I think about 20-30 points). These statistics underestimate the gains of people who take the SAT in 6th or 7th grade and later in 11th grade. They likely underestimate the score gains of 10th graders by much less.

So empirically, once you score in the 700s on a section, it is hard to improve. Of course you can still try, and the absurd Score Choice option means that the score you *report* will not fall upon retaking, at least for colleges that allow that reporting option.