<p>My daughter already was in a gifted program, but the head of her school thought it was worth pursuing because she could qualify for additional programs if she was interested.</p>
<p>She enjoyed tackling puzzles and I thought it would be a dry run when it didn’t matter what score she got.
She did do a snail mail ( which might tell you that it was 20 years ago!) course, but ultimately we decided her school had enough challenging material and close attention.</p>
<p>Your attitude makes it obvious why people advise the OP to not discuss their kids scores. Who do you think the talent searches are targeting – they are trying to identify those kids who are accelerated beyond their peers intellectually and give them a chance to get services to support those talents. Sometimes those kids are quiet in the classroom, or homeschooled, or seem unremarkable on the surface. How else would you suggest the truly exceptional kids be identified? And what criteria would you put in place to block a kid that you think wouldn’t score well from participating? Should someone (you?) get to veto that a kid shouldn’t take the test because you suspect they would score a 17?</p>
<p>You say there should not be “wholesale testing of kids where there is no indication of exceptional giftedness”. No one ever said there should be (or is) wholesale testing of middle school or younger kids for talent searches. I just did back of the napkin calculation, and figure that the 10000 kids in our region who took the test in my D2’s grade constitute about .003% of the kids that age in the US at that time. Say there are half a dozen of these searches supporting testing around the country, that is a whopping .018% of the population of kids that age taking the tests. You saw one kid crying (who might have been a kid who cries if he drops his cookie, too). And want to toss out the whole program. Or you would like to be the arbitrator of who is allowed to participate in the testing vs. not. You don’t have that right.</p>
<p>There are no doubt smart kids who don’t score highly, but you’d be hard-pressed to find an unintelligent student who can score a 2300 or higher on the SAT. Sure, testing success can be impacted by educational environment and opportunity, but a certain level of intelligence is needed to learn and apply the math concepts and to process the difficult readings. There is a reason why the national average score per section is closer to 500 than 800. Not all of those 500s are dyslexics or underprivileged students. After all, some kids could sit in advanced classes and study until they were blue in the face and still not be able to do the problems or understand the texts, and others are going to be able to do it all without ever having taken the classes. I’d venture a guess that many of the kids who allegedly “don’t test well,” are kids who really don’t have a strong understanding of the material. They may get decent grades in school, but could be due to pattern- matching. On a standardized test they are totally lost when they have to figure out what formula or concept they need, because now the problems aren’t in a chapter labeled with the concept they need to apply.</p>
<p>No test is a perfect measure, but scoring high is not just luck or genetics either. A genius may be born a genius, but he isn’t born knowing the definition of “obfuscate” or knowing what standard deviation means. He has to apply his brain to learn just like everyone else. </p>
<p>I’m not trying to “block” anybody from participating. You are putting words into my mouth. I just think it’s not a good idea to push a lot of kids into it when there isn’t any indication they might benefit. Tell us, what does the program offer to those thousands of kids after they score straight 420? And many of them are scoring lower than that.</p>
<p>I didn’t see any kid crying. The OP reported it. But from what I hear from other parents about their kids’ level of stress about some silly health test or something at school, I feel pretty confident that these kids would be freaking out over SAT scores that didn’t look like what colleges want to see. And yes, I have seen kids on this site very anxious about their middle school SAT scores.</p>
<p>I have a hard time with the idea that a few hours of answering some multiple choice questions is going to reveal hidden talents that were unknown to parents and completely unnoticed by so many teachers over 8 years. I would trust the people who actually know the kid, see how they think, how they write, how they approach problems, a lot more to assess a kid’s ability than just looking at how well they can do those rather specialized and time-constrained SAT questions, which offer a pretty narrow academic measure. And if there is really a concern about a mis-match between academic performance and ability, I would think there are better ways of testing and assessing than to give a college admissions test.</p>
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<p>The time pressure aspect could cause students who have issues with time pressure or who dislike being challenged in this manner freeze up during the exam and/or check out mentally. </p>
<p>A problem if they happen to have classes where they will have exams with an excess quantity or complexity of problems to solve and a very limited timeframe to complete it under timed test conditions or in jobs where examining, analyzing, synthesizing, and coming up with coherent convincing solutions in a highly pressured constrained time frame is a requirement like organizational business consulting at places like BCG. </p>
<p>While standardized exams aren’t the be-all and end-all of measuring academic potential or intelligence, a high score on it isn’t the completely meaningless measure as portrayed by some, either.</p>
<p>The standardized exams can help clarify the rigor of a high school, and distinguish the kid with a 4.2 from a academically challenging school, and the kid with the 4.2 from the small, grade-inflated private school where part of your grade is whether your uniform is clean and ironed. At our high school, the val and sal always are NMF’s and often get perfect or near-perfect SAT score. No one smart enough to be at the top of the class is going to be getting a score under 2200. Yet, go down the highway a ways to a few more urban areas, and there you’ll find the val is the kid with the 1800 and he’s considered a genius. </p>
<p>SAT score is just one of MANY measures that can distinguish the kid whose parent thinks he’s the smartest boy in town, from the kid who really is the smartest kid in town. Often, though, it’s the first measure that the parent actually notices, and it’s a third-party assessment, so it has some emotional weight to it. Just like people love to pooh-pooh the elite schools, many parents also love to pooh-pooh the middle school math tracking and the high school’s honors and AP classes. (The kids aren’t really smarter, they’re just pushed by their parents. They don’t really learn more, they just have more homework to do. I want my kids to have a normal childhood, not be stressed, etc. etc. ) The first time they start to question whether their views were correct or not is after the PSAT or first SAT score comes in for their child and they notice a pattern. </p>
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<p>High SAT scores don’t necessaily correlate to higher IQs. You can teach to the test, but all that does is make you a good test taker. It doesn’t guarantee an increase in either fluid intelligence or abstract problem solving. </p>
<p>Kids are so much more than a number. I find it sad that people feel the need to rank children this way. My parents would never have thought to compare me to my peers to see who was “the smartest kid.” Smartest is what area? I could choose to join Mensa, or not. I could choose to attend college, or not. What mattered was finding a path that inspired you, working to attain your goals, encouraging everyone around you to strive for theirs, and helping them along the way if it was in your power to do so. </p>
<p>The SAT is meant to be used as a yardstick to compare grading scales of thousands of high schools. It’s not an IQ test and it’s not intended to be used to determine a child’s suitability for certain jobs. An average SAT score doesn’t necessarily indicate that a child has a processing issue or lower IQ than those with higher scores, and processing issues don’t necessarily preclude people from succeeding in careers that require fluid reasoning. Can useful information be obtained from these tests? Yes. They aren’t useless, even though some people like to assume that those who don’t use them to rate children’s overall intelligence think that they are. They’re just not a reliable method for IQ ranking or validating that your kid is the “smartest kid in town.” </p>
<p>You are preaching to the choir. No, SAT’s aren’t a reliable method for IQ ranking, and I doubt any one thinks we should ever rank for IQ anyway. SAT’s do reveal mastery of core knowledge and skills, however, and that mastery is loosely tied to intelligence. But this thread is not about what should be, but what is. It’s about how our world rightly or wrongly treats standardized testing and therefore why parents get upset when they learn their kids’ scores don’t stack up well. Our state keeps adding new standardized tests every year, so the importance of testing does not seem to be waning just yet.</p>
<p>So, since many high schoolers do take these tests, and since they matter for college admissions, and since high scorers are recognized, therefore the tests do serve as a crude proxy for smartness whether we like it or not, and whether you agree they should or not. You aren’t going to convince people otherwise and they are going to continue to feel bad and there will continue to arise issues like in the OP. In fact, as you alluded, now employers also use the SAT as a proxy for smartness. I really dislike that practice, but it happens all the time. So as long as it does, people are going to be really sensitive about scores. I keep my mouth shut about them.</p>
<p>I just glanced at the NMF recognition thread. At some high schools, NMF’s names are even placed on the changeable sign outside the school building, or announced on the football field at homecoming! Where there is publicity, there is fodder for hurt feelings and envy. </p>
<p>I think the SAT exam (or ACT exam) is a legitimate way of identifying highly gifted children at a relatively young age but if the child has to take the exam three times within one year (especially when the first score was very good) to obtain a particular score, I see something wrong. Maybe a pushy parent? Maybe a misguided child? 11 year olds really shouldn’t be stressing over SAT/ACT scores.</p>
<p>FWIW, I opted to NOT have my child test into CTY although several parents asked me if she had - it was a big thing around my area. No, because she had learning issues. She MAY have been gifted (when we had her evaluated, the tests said ‘yes’) but I felt with the issues, CTY would not be an appropriate venue for her. OTOH, my sister was using CTY material for her son when he was in first grade. It really depends on the child, and hopefully not the parent. </p>
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<li><p>In the privileged little (mainly) private-school world I inhabit, where all the children are above-average, hardly anyone puts their kids through the middle-school enhancement programs. Only two of my kids’ friends did that, and while they were certainly among the smartest kids in a smart group, neither one had anything like a clear claim to being the smartest kid in his or her grade at their school. (To be fair, each would have been part of any such discussion, had it occurred.) They wound up going to good colleges and getting good jobs, but no better on either score than several of their other classmates. It would have been ludicrous to suggest that they lacked intellectual peers in their home environment; they had plenty of intellectual peers. There was lots of competition, but not any jealousy. Interestingly (at least to me), each of these kids developed a strong anti-intellectual streak in college, expressing a lot of contempt for academic inquiry.</p></li>
<li><p>I knew one other kid who did a program like that – a girl who lived next door to us in 1983-1985. She went to the Hopkins program. She was really enthusiastic about it, as were her parents. A few years later, when she was in high school, it turned out that she had been recruited into a Satanist coven at Hopkins and had been continuously involved since then in some pretty horrific activities, which included regular sexual abuse by adults. Much therapy ensued, and her parents’ marriage fell apart under the pressure. (None of this was shared easily, but by that point her mother was a long-time friend, and it was felt that we deserved some explanation why her daughter, whom we adored, was no longer available for babysitting, ever.) But she recovered pretty well. She went to a great college, and is a pioneering woman in a specific part of the tech world. One might attribute that to the Hopkins program if it weren’t about half a tick over from what her father has done for his whole career.</p></li>
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<p>The kid with a 17 probably wouldn’t be crying if the kid with a 26 kept that result private.</p>
<p>I wonder how the parents of the kid with a 17 got the idea he may be gifted? Was the decision to test him theirs, or based on some identification by the school? In our district, they give out the CTY modified SAT test information to a handful of kids based on having scored in the 99th percentile of the school-given achievement testing. I don’t know, on average, how many of them go on to qualify for the program. Mine did, but the cost was prohibitive.</p>
<p>I read JHS’s post about the young woman who had been recruited into a Satanist coven at Hopkins, and later became a pioneering woman in a specific part of the tech world. Then I saw the sentence, “One might attribute that to the Hopkins program if it weren’t about half a tick over from what her father has done for his whole career.”
And I thought, “Wait, the father made a career out of membership in a Satanist coven?” Just an illustration that high SAT scores do not guarantee good reading comprehension!</p>
<p>In our district, a student normally has to score in the top 5% in an on-level standardized achievement test to be invited to participate in a talent search. Top 5% is reasonably considered gifted by some. It may be difficult to tell exactly how strong a student is, because the on-level test does not differentiate that well at the high end. Careless errors might lead to low-part-of-the-top-5% scores, when a student is quite gifted.</p>
<p>In our district, some of the parents have used the outcome of 7th grade SAT testing to argue successfully for allowing their children to take more advanced courses (e.g., high-school courses in middle school), when the students really wanted to do that. (Our family did not do this.) The tests may also permit a student to qualify for an accelerated math program at a local university. (We did this.) This is a really good thing, if parents want their children to have the opportunity to take high-school-level geometry with proofs. That has been eliminated at the local high school. A lot of the utility of the tests for home-school-district placement depends on the philosophy of the local school, which is highly variable from district to district.</p>
<p>In our state as well, a student has to score the top 5% in a standardized test to be able to participate in the JHU Talent Search. S did it because he honestly enjoys taking exams. D did it because she didn’t want to be left out of anything that S did, Some of their cousins did it because their private school encouraged kids who qualified to participate. None of the kids we know were particularly traumatized by their scores one way or another. None of them opted to go to any college campus or participate in any of the activities for JHU CTY, but my brother & SIL knew some neighbors who did participate and enjoyed it. One of our neighbors also participated and enjoyed it Our kids felt it was too much money. </p>
<p>I do think that taking the SAT in 7th and 8th grade gave our kids more familiarity with the exam and format so they were more comfortable and confident in taking the PSAT and SAT when they took it in HS. They only shared their scores with us, their parents.</p>
<p>If athletic times and performances, and sports match scores, were kept secret, then I wouldn’t need to cry about my lack of physical coordination and sports prowess.</p>
<p>I don’t have a problem with using test scores to gain entrance to accelerated courses in high school. Some people, however, go overboard and use the results to mentally rank students. They believe the higher the test score, the smarter the kid (i.e. the higher the IQ). They study Naviance and make comments like, “How did THAT kid with a lower SAT get into school x and my kid didn’t?! Oh, THIS one is a URM, and THAT one is an athlete. And SHE has no social skills, but I bet she got better LORs than she deserved because her teachers felt sorry for her.” Some people have some pretty spiteful things to say about children they perceive to be less intelligent than their kid.</p>
<p>Publishing the results of sporting events is not the same as broadcasting SAT scores. My time on the 50-yard dash directly correlates to my athletic ability. You can use that number to accurately compare my skills to other athletes. My SAT score doesn’t correlate to my intelligence quotient, so you can’t use it to compare my innate intelligence to other students. You can use it to determine how prepared I may be for college courses, which is what universities do, but using it to help you determine who’s the “smartest kid in town” is a misuse of the results. Attitudes like that contribute to the hurt feelings the OP talked about. </p>
<p>Having had kids who participated in talent searches, and having met many of the kids at various programs, you can all claim that being 12 years old and scoring an 800 on an SAT test means nothing (or means something- but not that the kid is intelligent, or any more intelligent than another smart kid in town) and I’m calling the BS police.</p>
<p>These are NOT kids who are your garden variety nagged, pushed, tiger parented bright but stressed out kids. Some of them are, in fact, extraordinary. Many of them have parents who seem quite normal (dad’s a minister, mom’s a social worker, they’d be thrilled to have the kid try out for the tennis team except the kid would rather spend his or her after school hours learning Number Theory.) The parents know the kid is smart but sometimes the kid is not doing all that well in school and may be acting out, plain bored, or whatever. Having the kid show up as intellectually precocious- not because Grandma claims he’s special, but because on a nationally normed test the kid scored in the 99th percentile, can actually be life-altering for this kid.</p>
<p>If we can provide differentiated instruction for the kids with Asperger’s and the kids with Down’s syndrome and the kids with auditory processing disorders, why so negative on providing appropriate instruction to kids whose brains happen to operate a faster/deeper/better level than your kids??? and how else to identify them except by administering some sort of normed assessment? You don’t like the SAT because it doesn’t find the smartest kid in town. Guess what- your middle school kid scored a 600, and you’re right- he’s not the smartest kid in town. But if there’s a kid a few towns over, who is flunking 7th grade math because his worksheets are messy and he doesn’t show his work and his parents think he needs tutoring to learn how to do percentages… and they all discover that he’s scored an 800 on the math SAT with no prep… well, that says something.</p>
<p>The SAT is the best measure of smarts we have because it is commonly taken and requires both prior learning and cognitive skills like problem solving. And yes, austinmshauri, tests like the SAT bring parents’ misty-eyed assessments of their children down to reality, and more importantly they perform the service of cutting through all the subjective crap that goes on in high schools (which you seem to think doesn’t legitimately go on, such that anyone who notices is spiteful or jealous): teacher favoritism (pets get better grades, opportunities, and LOR’s), nepotism (BOE member’s or teacher’s kid gets the award over better-qualified peers), grade inflation (rampant now, due to teacher salaries beginning to be tied for grade progression), variation in rigor by teacher for the exact same class in the same high school, and so on. </p>
<p>“If athletic times and performances, and sports match scores, were kept secret, then I wouldn’t need to cry about my lack of physical coordination and sports prowess.”</p>
<p>If you participate in a public display, of course the results are public. This is true whether the contest is athletic or intellectual, like Quiz Bowl. But standardized tests are private by default. They send you the results in a sealed envelope. If you want to publicize them, it seems there ought to be a reason to do it. I don’t see a reason that outweighs the possible headaches.</p>