Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Do our kids burn out?

LAUSD has more than 640,000 students, according to its own website. Of those, approximately 140,000 are enrolled in high school. The top 0.1% of this population would be 140 students. Assuming half of these best-and-brightest are entered into a district math competition (some because they're intrinsically motivated, some to pad their transcripts, and some because they're pushed by adults), that's 70 students at different grade levels competing for one prize, every single one of which is EG or higher.

And that's just for a local prize.

I wonder if math competitions are a good example here.

You can't really change your computational speed with effort.

I suppose you can learn some mathy tricks to take advantage of mathy shortcuts.

I think you missed my point. Your post suggested that the top 0.1% are all at basically the same level (so that "the number hours of study and practice [would] become a significant determining factor in success.") But there is as much of a range of ability in the top 0.1% as there is in the next 49.9%.

Pics or it didn't happen.

I didn't miss your point, but I think you're misunderstanding how distributions work.

Assuming a distribution of talent that conforms perfectly to statistical odds, there won't be any +6 or +5SD students in this hypothetical competition, because they're too rare (1:1 billion and 1:3.5 million, respectively). You'd have 4-5 students of IQ 160, and about 20 others or so who are within +/- 5 IQ points of them, all of whom are close enough in cognitive ability that it has a negligible influence on the ultimate outcome. Other factors become more important.

That's not the appropriate pic.

I'm pretty sure that the actual tail is fat.

Each year, the IMO will have a few dozen contestants at at least +5SD, and will occasionally have a +6SD contestant. (This is talking about math ability, not IQ per se.)

Then that would explain why we seem to be talking past each other, because I was quite clearly talking about IQ all along.

No it wouldn't explain anything. That was just a paranthetical comment to refer to the appropriate measure of ability. In almost any endeavour, achievement comes from a combination of ability and effort, and while effort can make up some ground, there is a limit to that.

You made this comment.

This essentially implies that people in the top 0.1% (i.e. at least +3SD above average) are all essentially at the same level of ability (and for this argument, "ability in what?" doesn't really matter). They're not at the same level of ability at all. There is as much difference between +6SD and +3SD as there is between +3SD and +0SD (average). While effort will certainly make a difference, it can't make up for huge differences in ability, for many types of endeavours.