Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Talent search award ceremonies - attend, or not?

That's the only thing I remember about going when I was a kid: getting the scoop on the other kids from my hometown who were invited.

You're not the only one Dottie! I will be very interested to see the list.

And, yes, it does seem a VERY long time to wait.

Why the interest in knowing who else was invited?

You mean, aside from my insatiable desire to know everything? I actually made some friends I wouldn't have otherwise because they were different ages/in different grades/in different schools. When you're in a secret club, it's nice to know a few other people who are in it too.

Seems reasonable. We generally know who else was testing locally and it seems to be mostly the same group of kids from year to year. (All Explore & SAT testing takes place at our local uni, so you see the other kids.) Some of these kids spend months prepping for the test, so it didn't necessarily occur to me that they would be good friends for dds in that they are coming from a different place on this and dds don't usually do as well with kids from high pressured competitive environments. I know that dd11 did see some kids from her middle school this year who she wouldn't have known were involved in talent search otherwise, though. Of course, they were icky boys, so they are unlikely to be new buddies -- lol!

Well, I have to admit that I am quite disappointed on dd11's behalf. WATS said that all invites for the Colorado awards ceremony would be emailed by the end of the day today & when I spoke with the director down there a while back about something else, she told me to expect that dd would be in with her SAT scores being what they were. I know that different talent search regions have different scores, but dd's CR and writing scores were in the top 10% of Duke's region, so I also assumed that they would be in the top 25% of ours. In any case, no email, so I can only assume that she didn't make it.

Cricket, I have to second what Dottie said. Maybe WATS is just running a little behind. The director there is very, very nice. It won't hurt if you send her an email to see if the invites got out on time. She is very good at replying emails.

No, actually I emailed to ask after I posted and they emailed back that her scores didn't qualify in the top 25%. I'm waiting for the interpretive guide to see what our local 7th grade scores look like! We must either have a lot of really bright kids in our local talent search or a lot of kids who really studied hard.

I feel bad for dd, though, b/c this has been a disappointing week for her already. She had applied for a scholarship through NSGT hoping to get partial funding for an educational tour of Italy with a school group next year. (Dds are 5/8th Italian & dd11 really wants to study Italian at some point.) She had a pretty good application in that she had a strong letter of recommendation, her desire to study the Italian language and culture is written into her ALP (which we enclosed), etc. She found out a few days ago that she didn't get the scholarship, so she's not going to be able to make the trip.

I'll have to let her know about the awards when I pick her up from a school program later. She was expecting to be in based upon the comments from the director of CBK & how her scores stacked up in other regions. I'll just have to be more tight lipped next year if she tests again so I don't get her hopes up! Gosh, her CR score more than qualifies for the 8th-11th grade program for CBK, so I thought that I was safe in telling her that she was likely to be getting an award.

So, how do you think that they are figuring those percentiles?

I may be really dense at math, but I was assuming that if you had a group of say 100 kids, that 25 of them would be in the top 25 percent even if numbers 1-10 got scores of 700+ for instance. Kids #11-15 could have scores more in the 500 range and they'd still be above the other 75 kids regardless of how they compared to the amazing scoring kids.

Is this not how the top 25% is figured?

I don't know anything about WATS so this may not apply here, but at least some ceremonies like Duke's are based on a percentile against standard test norms (meaning Jr/Sr in HS for the SAT) instead of the talent search norms (meaning the GT 7th graders).