@homerdog To be accepted to the CTD camps, a kid needs to demonstrate giftedness. However, that just means that they are in the top 5% of the population, and that probably describes about half the kids who apply to any of the more selective colleges. Based on the other descriptions of your kids, it is fairly clear that they both are gifted.
Since gifted kids tend to hang out with other gifted kids, it is likely that many of the kids with which you have interacted are gifted, so that your standards, are, shall we say, “skewed”…
However, there are many gifted kids who are underachievers. Since acceptance to colleges is based more on achievements than on potential, and for good reason, just demonstrating that a kid is gifted will not get that kid into a college. Otherwise, being a Davidson Young Scholar would be a hook, like a national level award is.
As I wrote, gifted kids are often underachievers. Colleges with challenging curricula will not want to admit a kid who will do so-so on their courses, even though they likely could do better. Even if the underachieving is because of the need for a challenge, a colleges like HMC doesn’t want students who will only do well on courses which they consider challenging, they prefer students who will do well on all courses.
Of course, if a student demonstrates brilliance extremely clearly, like, say, solving a previously unsolved mathematical problem, producing an original piece of research or writing, etc, they may not care that the student has a GPA of 3.4. Otherwise, the recommendations of teachers and GC’s that “we know that they’re brilliant” will likely not convince the college to ignore the relatively low GPA (which is still substantially higher than average).
The CTD camps are awesome, and most of the high school ones also provide HS credit, which can help boost a GPA, if the challenging environment of the classes results in higher grades.