Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Change in the Davidson SAT Requirements

I am curious about the rationale for the recent change in the Davidson Academy SAT requirements. The scores they now require seem much more reasonable to me (ie. they seem to more clearly correspond with IQ scores in the 99.9 percentile). In fact, the new requirements seem more appropriate for even the pre-2005 SA). Still I am curious about just what went into this decision.

I am especially interested because I notice that there does not seem to be a change in score-percentile correspondence in the scores of Seniors between the pre-2005 SAT and the 'New' one. I also notice that CTY has not raised its eligibility requirements for its various programs since 2005. In particular I am curious about whether Davidson has reason to believe that the new score requirements would correspond to the 99.9 percentile on even the pre-2005 SAT (though of course not the pre-1995). Or is this just a late response to a deep dumbing down of the test...

http://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/Articles.aspx?ArticleID=144&NavID=1_33

Hi DRK,

This message is from the Davidson Institute/Academy Staff:

The decision to update eligibility requirements for the Davidson Academy application stems from the previous scores being closer to the 95th percentile, rather than 99th percentile. The original scores reflected the SAT scores reported by intellectual talent searches; we looked at a broader range of scores, knowing that students taking the test in the context of intellectual talent searchers were younger than students who typically take the SAT. We believe that the lower scores resulted in us casting a wide net which resulted in many students being invited to the Academy for the curriculum-based assessment portion of the application process. However, we were turning away approximately half of the applicants we invited for that next step in the application process. Raising the bar to reflect the 99th percentile on the SAT was done to increase the likelihood of academically prepared and intellectually qualified applicants being invited to our curriculum-based assessment, with fewer of those students being turned away following that assessment. The SAT scores currently listed are more consistent with our intelligence test score expectations. We will continue to evaluate our score criteria over time and consult with experts in gifted education and testing as we do so.