The other side of high achievement

<p>My daughter never would have participated in the talent search if it weren’t for the classes. Just never crossed our minds to do it. She’s bright, but not “gifted”. She found a class she wanted to go to, and she arranged to take the qualifying test herself. I was called in when she needed my credit card to pay for it online and her dad drove her to the test. That was our only involvement. Honestly, we were surprised when she qualified. But she enjoyed the course and her self-confidence got a boost when she realized that she fit in with a group that she thought would be her intellectual superiors. It did change the way she saw herself. </p>

<p>“Why does the concept of bragging keep getting mentioned on this thread?” Because that’s exactly what a lot of parents do.</p>

<p>My parents would choose carefully whose achievements to talk about (and also which), if they choose to talk about either my sister’s achievements or mine.</p>

<p>I am happy for the kids who get ID’ed as gifted and then are able to have enriching experiences due to these exams. In the old days it was pretty lonely to be a gifted kid in a small town. DK how it was in big cities. Is it still lonely to be gifted in some parts of the country? It may be. In our experience the situation is better for kids in large cities today.</p>

<p>In my admittedly limited experience the tests are pushed on too many kids. Maybe parents are ambitious for their kids, maybe the teachers like to throw the net wide, but I do hear about a good number of kids who make low scores, too. </p>

<p>The one problem I saw with a smart, but only normally accelerated middle school student taking the SAT in 7th grade, was that (at least in our district) s/he would only have had half a year or so of algebra 1 and no geometry at test time. I would be concerned that a low math score might unnecessarily discourage a student since the low score would be due more to not having seen the material than a deficiency or lack of ability. For students who are already beyond the standard math acceleration of two grades, this would not be a problem. </p>

<p>Why would a student be discouraged in * seventh grade* because of a lower score on a * college* aptitude test?</p>

<p>My own did not take algebra until eighth grade (the horrors!) and took AB calc their senior year. Had I know how poorly many colleges teach calculus, I might have had them accelerated. </p>

<p>They did not take early SAT’s partly for this reason, and when they took their SAT’s in high school they did not do any worse than peers who had been accelerated. </p>

<p>Our experience has been that we share academic milestones with grandparents and only other parents of gifted children. While posting athletic achievements on Facebook, Instagram and the like is socially acceptable, sharing any sort of academic achievement is usually met with some sort of derision. </p>

<p>It’s can be a tough road raising gifted kids.</p>

<p>^^^^What @Agentninetynine said. Gifted kids face enough internal pressure to succeed. The last thing they need is the external pressure to fail that can come from jealous parents/kids. You’ve learned your lesson. Keep your child’s scores, IQ test results, etc. to yourself. Let others do the noticing. And you can always come here to brag. That’s what I do!</p>

<p>Should they be discouraged EK, no! Could they become discouraged, yes I think so. They are young and may lack a mature perspective on their future intellectual growth and yet they know what is, and what is not, a “good” SAT score. </p>

<p>We don’t even share test scores with grandparents. For one thing, I don’t consider high test scores much of an accomplishment, in particular IQ scores. Bragging about those feels to me like bragging about one’s kid’s height in that it can be influenced to a slight extent by enrichment but is much much more a factor of what a kid’s lucky enough to be born with. For another, bless their hearts, my parents like to brag, and the last thing I need is for the cousins to feel bad. Overall my siblings have the same attitude. We share major accomplishments but keep things like scoring high on a standardized test or making the honor roll to ourselves and celebrate them quietly in our nuclear families. Our kids will have plenty of opportunities to shine in public. </p>

<p>Dunno, both our kids in 7th & 8th grades got higher than the median SAT admissions scores for our flagship U, as did many other kids. They must have had enough math to do well. </p>

<p>We did have some evidence that our kids were learning at their own pace when S was reading before he started pre-school and was trying to help the preschool director improve the standardized placement test she was trying to administer to him, at age 3. D would come home every day from preschool also at age 3 and tell us how each kiddo in her class was feeling and why–she was unerringly accurate.</p>

<p>I just ask parents, what are the potential up sides of disclosure outside immediate family versus the potential down sides? Most conclude that the up sides are minimal (a moment of shared pride or sympathy), while the down sides could be substantial (jealousy, teasing, hostility, tension between former friends, being branded a braggart). I think the comparison to sharing one’s salary is apt.</p>

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<p>All of the benefits are not widely advertised. This CTY online group was invitation only. It was a social lifesaver for my kid at that age. Obviously the kid who got a 17 probably wasn’t a great candidate for the talent search test, but that does not negate the value for kids who are. D2 also ended up becoming a Davidson Young Scholar (she didn’t apply, she was added to the program after her first Davidson THINK experience). The Davidson program helped us work with her school to convince them to accelerate her in a subject she was especially strong in. Never would have foreseen that benefit, but again am glad we signed her up for the talent search or that wouldn’t have happened. You seem to be trying to justify your own decision not to involve your kids in talent search testing – and that decision is fine for you. But stop slamming something when you have limited experience with it or the type of kids it is intended to help.</p>

<p>The problem is that most of the kids participating are not the kids it is intended to help. And you can see plenty of unhappy posts on this site where they think their future is ruined because of what score they got as a 13 year old. How does it make sense to test a kid on material they haven’t even studied in school yet and then label them gifted or make them feel like failures?</p>

<p>The average SAT scores reported by the Duke TIP for 7th grade participants are 440 450 420 or ACT composite of 18. <a href=“http://tip.duke.edu/downloads/ts/7/summary.pdf”>http://tip.duke.edu/downloads/ts/7/summary.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;
I don’t see the point of this testing. </p>

<p>And I have plenty of experience with the type of kids it is supposed to help. </p>

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<p>But part of it is how the testing situation is set up for the kid. I’m sure if my daughter had gotten a 17 on the ACT when she took it as seventh grader, she would have thought “okay…that was interesting…you never know until you try” and then she would have gone on to something else. She didn’t expect to get into a “gifted” program. We didn’t expect her get into a “gifted” program. Actually, I still don’t define her as a “gifted” student (smart, sure; gifted, no). The test was a means to an end, not a self-defining event.</p>

<p>I’m not saying that it’s a good idea to underestimate a child’s potential. But I also don’t think it’s a good idea to put too much weight on a single measure or testing event. Or to shy away from trying something because the results might be disappointing. </p>

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<p>We have no way of knowing. The SAT/ACT aren’t IQ tests and, as far as I know, most school districts don’t publicly release the results of any IQ tests they do administer, so we have no way of knowing where each student falls in relation to “average” on the IQ scale. All we have are random grades, SAT/ACT scores, and a whole lot of assumptions about children we don’t know well enough to pin labels on.</p>

<p>It’s not a foregone conclusion that kids who scored higher on the SAT are smarter than those who didn’t score as well, although some people like to think so. Some highly intelligent people do well on standardized tests; others don’t. Dyslexics, for example, generally don’t score as well on them, yet their IQs are just as likely to fall in the average and above average range as people without dyslexia. Unfortunately, many dyslexics aren’t diagnosed or, if they are, aren’t provided with the resources they need to excel. So there’s a whole segment of the population (1 in every 5) who are routinely labelled as “average” or worse, who are often assumed to be less intelligent than their peers, and who may very well have lower SAT/ACT scores than their classmates, yet are often just as intelligent. </p>

<p>Dyslexics aren’t the only students who can receive lower scores than their peers for reasons other than possessing a lower IQ. There are actually quite a few reasons some neurotypical students might perform better on standardized tests than other, equally bright, neurotypical children. In general: Students who have access to AP courses do better than students in districts that can’t afford to offer those classes. Students who have at least three years of math, science, social studies, and English score better than kids who don’t. Students whose schools include SAT prep in their curriculum do better than students whose schools don’t include it. Students whose schools offer honors classes, and enough sessions of them so they don’t conflict with other required courses, do better than students from schools who don’t. Students who come from families who can afford test prep (especially the expensive variety that teaches all the tricks and shortcuts) do better than students who come from families who can’t. In general, the higher the income, the higher the score. </p>

<p>I find it interesting that when parents say the students who get high scores on these tests aren’t automatically smarter than students who score lower, some people assume the posters are low scorers who are offended at the very thought. I wonder why it never seems to occur to them that perhaps the posters are actually on the other end of the spectrum. Not everyone who scores well on these types of tests, who find that academics come very easily, attribute situational differences to innate mental superiority. </p>

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<p>i have never seen such a post out here. I see kids occasionally asking if their score is good (middle schoolers). And it pretty much always is if they are out here asking. So… the reason it is called a talent “search” is because they are looking to identify kids who may not be identified as gifted yet. In our city, teachers often recommend kids for the testing from the public schools. It isn’t always the parents looking to sign them up. You are just looking for some reason why this is a bad idea… it isn’t. The worst that happens is that a kid gets a score that is logical for their age group. But not every kid does. My D2 scored higher than 10,000 other kids in her grade who took the SAT the same year she did (3rd highest score in the entire talent search pool), and got some needed opportunities and services because of it. But if her older sister had taken the test (which we had never heard of when her sister was that age), I expect she would have finished far down in the pack. But it wouldn’t have been a crushing blow to her life – just a Saturday morning spent taking a test.</p>

<p>My youngest son was part of the Duke TIP and took the SAT in 7th or 8th grade. We did not share the results with anyone, not even him until he was in high school - it didn’t matter and he didn’t care enough to find out. The point of taking the test was for him to be comfortable with how it was administered. I think all of his friends were in the Duke TIP program as well, seems like everyone was and I don’t think any of the kids knew what they did on their SAT at least they didn’t talk about it. My middle son qualified for the Duke TIP but did not want to participate and he didn’t want to take the SAT and suggested all the summer camps were just to get money from the parents by playing on their excitement of their child’s success. I didn’t have the money to send them anyway so it didn’t matter.</p>

<p>Fantastic, so your daughter who outscored 10,000 other participants is hardly representative of the kids who are being targeted here. I really doubt the typical kid scoring in the low 400s, which is the average kid in this talent search program, is so intellectually adrift that they cannot find any peers in their school or local area or even their own classroom. I’d be surprised if the kids in my daughter’s lunch group at middle school couldn’t score higher than that. </p>

<p>As a standardized admissions test to selective programs, or to identify those truly exceptional kids, sure, but wholesale testing of kids where there is no indication of exceptional giftedness makes no sense to me and I bet the parents of that crying boy regret having participated.</p>