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My kid's school invalidated his score for the gifted assessment, because he did a practice test. They said they will use different format to retest him. Anyone has this experience? I can't find any policy online saying you can't do practice test. What should I do?

It happens in New York City all the time.

Many parents and kids do not even know what type of tests were given in their school district. It's not like SAT or ACT. If someone has practice before the actual test, he/she may have unfair advantage over other kids.

Some practice such as SCAT from John Hopkins have sample questions in their website. Those questions will not show up in actual test and defintely OK and actually encouraged to do it. If you try to get something like OLSAT, what you get from internet may probably be the actual test. That would be a big NO. Your kid might have said he/she have seen those questions before.

That probably a honest mistake on your part. I would wait for the different format.

If the test was a cognitive abilities test, then some of the most important sections are designed to present problems which are novel to the test subject, who has to devise methods for solving them on the fly. How quickly and successfully they do this is an important measure of ability.

If the subject has already seen these types of questions and formed a method, they will perform faster next time. If they have had the opportunity to review their results and refine their methods, then they'll receive a boost to success rate. The results can no longer be used to compare against other test subjects who never saw those problems before.

This is why guidelines usually call for a full calendar year between assessments using the same instrument, or for choosing a different instrument using a completely different format if retesting needs to be completed sooner.

And now that they know your DS received prep for the first instrument, they'll be worried that he might have been prepped for their second one.

Actually, two years.
Yup.

What I don't understand is why school districts insist on using the CogAT as the sole determiner of GT status when it is not a protected test in that I, as a homeschooler, can order the CogAt to administer to my children. The exact same form of the test even!

Also, our district tests for GT placement in the spring and if a kid needs to be retested for some reason, they do that the next fall, so like 4 months later, using the same form of the CogAT one level up. At least half of the questions are the same as what were on the previous level.

For what you should do - don't prep your child. Don't even ask what that new format is.

Schools can be biased regarding placement in any programs they have as many parents here have experienced, so you need to look at your motivations. If you feel a need to prep a child for testing for GT services - then you need to examine your motivations for wanting your child in GT services. Do you feel that it is critical your child gets in so your child is not bored to death or acting out because he is not getting an appropriate education? Or are you concerned that if he does not get in, he will be left behind? Do you feel there are disabilities or language barriers that would prevent him from doing as well?

But - to answer your question about what to do - don't prep and don't ask what the new format is.

You may not find an explicit policy, but most tests state that certain situations - like practice tests or retaking too soon - will invalidate the results. So there may not be a policy explicitly saying "don't use a practice test" but if they detect any prep, the schools will question if GT program is the right fit. Keep in mind that putting a child in an environment not designed to help them excel is damaging - either by boredom or by putting them into an environment that may stress them out by being in over their head.

This is a good link to look at:
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/test_prep.htm

ETA - regarding CogAT, which you asked in a different post, aeh would know more about that. It does appear that unlike other tests, CogAT has practice questions or examples that they explicitly encourage to use before the actual testing just to be familiar with the format, but it may be that it is to be directed by the teacher, not at home - to allow the *whole* class to have the same prep (or lack of prep). Those practice questions would not show up on the real test. Beyond that, it is really a question for you to ask the school regarding the CogAT.

I'd be interested in what type of test it was.

How did they know he did a practice test and what test was it? The CogAT website specifically says that kids should be prepped "to level the playing field", and has resources for teachers to prep their students. DD's teacher never did this. If I had known, I would have prepped DD and we could have avoided disastrous results where she couldn't handle the timing aspect and left half of it blank. Her CogAT score was approx. 20 points lower than her FSIQ and 30+ points lower than her GAI on the WISC. So these school ability tests are not always accurate (or even close to being accurate) to representing a child's ability. I don't blame parents for prepping unless they are trying to get a child who is not gifted into gifted programming. That being said, it depends on the test.

No one measure ought to be the sole determinant. To learn more about the CogAT, its uses, and limitations, some of these research papers may be of interest.