Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment CogAt -- curious mom needs help

Both of our daughters just took the CogAt, but the school did not provide the scores yet. However, the assistant principal came to me and told me that our younger daughter, in first grade, had taken three subsections of the test. She got all of the items correct on one subtest, and missed one item on each of the other two subtests. She was placed in GT for math and language arts. The asst principal did not mention our other daughter's scores, but put her in GT for language arts.

What do you think younger scores were? I probably will not find out until after Christmas. Does anyone have any insight? I have heard that the CogAt is not that difficult compared to other tests, and dd's first cousins also got all of the items correct in at least one subtest.

Thank you.

Also, I forgot to mention that she finished all of the questions on all of the subtests.

Thank you, Dottie.

7 y.o. is a typical age for first graders here at some point during the year, but she has a September birthday, just one week after the cut off. Still, so many of the kids are red-shirted she is not the oldest in her class. She took the test soon after her birthday, but a couple of months passed before we got the results.

I thought the top score on the CogAt was much lower, so it's interesting to hear it goes that high. I requested the report, but it may take a while.

They have her in special education and the gifted program, and I have to give them credit for that.

When we got CoGat scores they gave us age-based and grade-based percentiles. The age-based gets around the red-shirting issue since they are normed for kids the same age regardless of grade placement. They did not give us scores in the "150" format. When I asked, our GT department said that the "150" format misleads people to correlate with IQ so they only gave percentiles. The version that my daughter took in first grade only had about 40 questions per section. A perfect score correlated to 99th percentile. I seem to remember that missing one dropped it to 97th.

Well, I just received the scores, but they did not give it to me with the scaled scores, perhaps for the reasons you stated.

Form/Level 6/1

For National age scores and percentile ranks, she was in ability profile 9A, and it states "the number in the profile is the age stanine for the middle score on the three batteries. Scores for the three batteries do not differ significantly." On that part, she was in the 99 percentile and stanine 9 for Verbal and Nonverbal, but "only" 98 percentile and stanine 9 for quanititative.

She attempted all items. There were 44 items in each subtest. I am putting the number correct for each item.

For the grade scores, she was in National Stanine 9 in the 99th percentile for each subtest and for the composite score.

Verbal 43
Quantitative 43
Nonverbal 44 (all correct)

I am irked that they did not give me the scaled score. Don't they realize that I am curious here? How can I find out the scaled score?

What are you hoping to learn from the scaled scores? I would imagine that you can't get much more info from this test and that an individual IQ would tell you more at this point if there is more you need/want to know.

We did the WISC and WJ III, so I do know those scores. I am actually incredibly curious about test scores. As an undergraduate, that was one of my areas of interest, and I took a class on psychological testing. That interest was fallow for years until my own kids started taking tests. Now I find it utterly fascinating.

So plain old fashioned curiosity would be the answer.