Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Can a child throw a test?

My five-year-old DS just finished a gifted assessment. He had difficulty sitting still and concentrating. I sat in with him for they last part of his achievement test and noticed that he was not performing as well as he would at home. The psychologist's estimates of his scores were also lower than I had expected. He scored around the 95th percentile. This is a child who at the age of three asked me if language is symbolic. He has done numerous similar things. Tonight we were reading together and he flawlessly read sentences that were much harder than the ones he had stumbled over this morning during his assessment. When I complimented him on his reading he told me that it's a secret that he can read and that he only wants his dad and me to know. He has in the past expressed frustration that he is different from other kids and thinks differently than they do. Is it possible that he deliberately performed poorly?

Yes. This happened with our son when he was tested as a 3 year old. Whether a kid gets the 'yips' or does it on purpose it can happen. Fortunately our tester (from the Hoagies page) was able to recognize something was up when our guy was dead average on one verbal subtest and hit the ceiling on another. He did ok on the other stuff and we had enough to place him in the "gifted" bucket.

It maybe a self defense mechanism - nails that stick up are often not treated kindly.

If you can find a gifted program or camp or something it would be interested in to put him in with other kids who are more likely to be peers.

DS was younger when he was first tested, 3.5, but I was in the room observing and he was smirking and giving incorrect answers on purpose. There were some multiple choice questions and he pointed at things randomly without even considering the answer choices. For him, I think it was a defense mechanism because he hates being put on the spot or quizzed, and he was even worse back then. He is sensitive and can be perfectionistic so he probably figured it was better to not try at all than to try and get things wrong. He did do well with the non-verbal section, probably because that was more engaging to him and less threatening than needing to give verbal answers (being "quizzed" so to speak).

Yes--*I* did, back in the day. I remember very clearly giving random answers for several parts of the IQ test I took to get into the gifted program. Somehow I managed to score in the gifted range anyway.

When my son was being tested, I was listening in the next room. Somewhere in the middle of the vocabulary section, the tester told him that if he didn't know, he could just say so. So he said he didn't know for every item after that (and I know he knew some of them). Grrr.

This same son's reading comprehension scores on standardized achievement tests kept going down from the time he was 8 or so. I had a suspicion that he wasn't concentrating on the test. Finally, last year (at age 12) I gave him the ITED at home and told him if he didn't get his reading comprehension score up, we were going to start doing reading comprehension exercises. In addition I told him he had to read the passages and the questions aloud. Lo and behold, his reading comprehension score went from the 67th percentile to the 93rd on a test three years above his age-grade. He later told me that he hadn't been reading the passages before. Grrr again.

One of my sons scored a 98th percentile on a screening test to get into a gifted program. When he did the follow-up test, he scored an 18. Fortunately, the tester noted that he wasn't engaged and seemed to answer without any thought. When I asked him later what was going on, he said he was in a rush to get out for recess. So do kids throw tests? Yes.

I've posted the whole story here before, but my brother threw his test to get into the gifted program. Fortunately, he only got the idea to "trick" the examiner halfway through, so he still (barely) scored high enough to get into the program. (There's no doubt in my mind that my brother is PG. This kid was writing persuasive essays in fifth grade about the ethics of paying college athletes.) In his case, the motivation was that he had waited all the way through my test (which took something like twice as long as they had told my mother that it would), and then wanted to go home.

DD was still entirely capable of 'throwing' a test of enormous import as late as 12 or 13 years of age, which is why we were REALLY holding our breath over her PSAT. That was the first 'real' test like that-- timed, externally scheduled, and of do-or-die importance to the larger world.

We didn't bother with a formal eval of her when she was young due in very large part due to this tendency-- she was volatile and capricious in terms of her innate cooperation with ANY evaluation or assessment until she was about 13. Even the CAT-5 that we administered to her at 6yo, she hit ceilings on everything, but you could tell when she hit a wall because she started just randomly guessing on the last-- social studies-- section. She still scored ~96th percentile, but it was notably below the other sections.

And she was smoooooooooooth-- nearly good enough to fool even ME on occasion, and certainly good enough to fool anyone else, particularly if they didn't know her well.

She threw exams in school on a pretty regular basis, in fact. Until I got wise to it (cyberschool) and would simply (wordlessly) hand something back to her and say, "Well, I think you're going to be reworking THAT. You have an hour."

She only learned by me promoting the idea that there was a sort-of-immediate COST to those actions, see-- because the payoff for being flakey is certainly immediate.

I've seen several children attempt to throw cognitive assessments (and these are, of course, only the ones that I caught at it). Almost always it has been because they believe the outcome of doing well on the test will be something undesirable (although fatigue or impatience result in a low estimate, too, I don't really think of that as deliberate sabotage), such as, having to leave their neighborhood school and its community for another "special" program, being placed in more challenging classes, having to leave a sheltered support program. Once, I had a student deliberately underperform in an attempt to get -into- a special education setting.

My experience has been that kids are better at faking bad on the knowledge-based parts of tests, and often get tripped up (so to speak) on the nonverbal portions, which are less academic in appearance. And, yes, usually one can tell by the inconsistencies in performance within and between subtests. Again, this only applies to the kids I've caught.

This is why I like to spend a little extra time up front discussing the purpose of testing with children of all ages. I generally begin by asking them if anyone has talked to them about it, and what they think its purpose is. To that last point, I try to emphasize its value for self-knowledge, not so much for rank-ordering or placement decisions. For some children, I also point out that this kind of testing is only done once, or every few years, so it's important that we get a true picture of them.

DD has thrown her share, both deliberately and due to anxiety.

Fortunately she did not do this on her WISC, as it was what helped us understand her better and advocate. Part of that might have been due to our messaging "school hasn't been going great, so this is to help us all figure out how to make it go better." Because the stated objective was positive, she had an incentive to do as well as she could. If she knew in advance that it would mean leaving her current school (which to be fair, we didn't know either) she might have thrown it. She really wasn't good with change back then. In fact, I'm convinced she threw her Iowa assessment with the district TAG rep. because she was so ambivalent about skipping a grade.

We also warned her that the questions would get more and and more interesting and harder and that they were supposed to get harder than she could do, so she should expect that and not get upset or worried.

Y middle child threw the coding section of her first iq test, I'd say either because it hurt or was utterly boring, not for any more complex reason... Weirdly the psychologist didn't se to think it was odd or a problem that she did each item precisely twice (perfectly) then put down her pencil and watched the clock and could not be swayed to get going again. When I raised it as an issue she said DD was anxious (seriously? She was sure enough she'd done each item right twice, proving mastery and so could stop now, and you interpret that as anxiety? Smug maybe? Smart enough to know the test is boring?)....