Check out hoagies, not sure whether my link works.
But the highest cutoff anyone defines highly gifted as is 145, or three standard deviations above average. Some start at 137. By 160, everyone agrees that’s in profoundly gifted territory. Some, like the Davidson foundation, who should probably know what they’re doing, consider anyone with an IQ above 145 profoundly gifted.
Of course, you are in extremely murky area by then, with tiny subsets of the population you can’t actually norm tests for.
And as I pointed out way above, there seem to be different definitions about what profoundly gifted means. Davidson used (or did use) a +3SD cutoff, and I estimate that Hopkins’ SET program is slightly above +3SD.
I know kids who study for months for SATs. I have experienced young kids coming in for IQ testing that have been tested before. Then I met a little 5 y o. Boy who came for testing on a Saturday morning. I told the family we may only go for an hour and then continue another day. But his little boy loved the testing. We went straight thru, and at the end he says, “Aren’t there any more games?”
When I read above about the little boy who could figure out the number of cookies on a sheet, or the one who bought an algebra book, I’m sure they were like my little boy being tests for gifted program; they just love using their brains and figuring things out.
I’m surprised people are even testing kids’ IQ. I thought that became uncommon decades ago? Choice of whether to advance kids depends on many other variables, and such testing can be a very poor reflection of skills required to be successful in advanced classes. For example, my only experience with IQ testing was helping out someone I knew at a university, who was looking for people to take a test he created. He said I had a “ceiling score”, so he couldn’t estimate a specific number. However, I also got an average 500 on my CR SAT, which is apparently highly correlated with IQ testing.
If someone looking at a test structured like the one on at the university tried to put me in super accelerated English, the result likely would have been a disaster due to a combination of lack of interest/motivation, lack of vocabulary, lack of participation, and spectrum issues. However, if someone looking at a test structured like the CR SAT tried to keep in regular track math, the result would have been a disaster with me being bored out of mind and losing interest/motivation in a subject I was truly passionate in learning about and would gladly study for pleasure. I’m glad that college admission and life depends on much more than a one time test score.
Schools do IQ testing as part of child study team evaluations for special education. Some parents also get private IQ testing done in order to get their kids into gifted programs when the school says they don’t qualify… but that’s a whole other issue…
reason for taking iq test is same as reason for taking sat. it is required to access some educational benefits.
We never did an IQ test, but my S took the SAT at age 11 to qualify for Hopkins’ SET. Several programs use taking the SAT at a young age as a proxy for IQ. And like the 5 yr old above, S found the test “very relaxing”. :))
It turns out that SET doesn’t provide much in the way of support. But the same test result also qualified for Davidson Young Scholars, which provides many support services. We didn’t end up using them, but it was great to know they were available.
Years ago, I was paid by the schools to do testing. Also privately. Not everyone was looking for gifted placement. That was a very very small portion of what I did.
We did it at the recommendation of the pre-school teacher when D was – stirring the pot a lot, shall we say? We were going to get her evaluated in general, and the teacher suggested we start with that. Found a G/T specialist at a local university and she administered the test. 160+ I’d agree that we barely knew what to do with that information, but I’m still glad we had it.
^ IQ testing exists both in schools and privately. The latter tends to be expensive, and the quality of testing varies depending on the experience and expertise of the tester. My younger son - a special needs adoption from China - was tested in his public school as part of his IEP evaluation. My older son did not qualify for in-school testing. We knew that he exhibited many of the characteristics of highly gifted children, but did not pursue formal testing until he started having social problems, which affected his self-esteem. We felt it was important to understand him better, in order to better support him. By that point (age 10) he maxed out on most sections of the testing, which is generally designed to be administered to younger children, so the tester felt that his result (on the border of 4 standard deviations from the norm) was likely to be an under-estimate. Besides admission to selective programs and having objective testing data to show his school, the main value of the testing was for us to understand him better, and for him to understand that his accelerated interests and intensity - which tended to isolate him from the majority of kids his age - were a part of his inherent giftedness, and that there was nothing “wrong” about him. The results of his IQ testing also led to further testing that disclosed his central auditory processing disorder. He is far happier and better adjusted - socially as well as intellectually - as a result, so in our case it was well worth the effort and expense.
As a slight correction, 3 deviations above the mean is 99.865%(normal distribution). So 9100 over-estimates the number of high school students in that category.
Our school district administers the cog apt test to all students. They allow one retest. They do not accept any other testing for GATE placement. They need a certain percentile score in all 3 areas, math, verbal and spatial. I think it is 95 but don’t remember exactly. I know my younger kid, I never doubted she’d test in, my older I knew would be border line and she just missed spatial both years. She went through regular honors classes in middle school and IB in high school and is just fine without the GATE label. I did have (CRAZY) parents ask me multiple times why I didn’t prep her more for the test. I just roll my eyes.
You are right. It’s 99.865%. I got confused and added the lower 0.13%
But, number of high school students who can achieve 145 would be much more than 4550 due to reasons including; 145 from one of several test formats that gives one the highest score, possibility of multiple execution of the same test, and Flynn effect.
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People “prep” for the cogapt test? Isnt it like choosing the correct puzzle piece for the puzzle and stuff? How do you prep a kid for that?
Does it really matter whether 350, 9100, 4550, or some other number of high school seniors could theoretically get an arbitrary score on a test that is not used for college admissions, had they taken it? Plenty of students attend and are successful at selective colleges that would not theoretically meet the threshold. And plenty of students who would theoretically meet the threshold do not attend selective colleges. Some meeting the threshold would be unsuccessful had they attended.
If the definition of “gifted” is really narrow enough to be 1 in 740 (above 3SDs is 99.865%), then it’s not surprising that schools would lack the resources to accommodate the type of student that only comes once every couple years in the school (or more often in schools that have notably different distribution from general population). When the OP was talking about parents requesting accelerated kindergarten for their gifted children, I expect most parents were using a wider definition.
“Does it really matter whether 350, 9100, 4550”
No it doesn’t for college admission. But it could matter for how to better care those young kids in grade school.
"If the definition of “gifted” is really narrow enough to be 1 in 740 "
No it was definition of Highly or Profoundly gifted. Also due to Flynn effect and concentrations, some metropolitan areas may see as many as 1/100 of them, and a lot more of those who are still highly gifted but not the 0.1%.
“I expect most parents were using a wider definition.”
The common gate definition would be 2~5% But why limit there? Those 0.1~1% need even more help and there are plenty of them, especially in metropolitan area.
Three standard deviations above the mean seems like a reasonable cutoff for considering issues like skipping grades. I would be surprised if more than 1 in 740 5-year-olds actually could do long division in their heads and were reading Harry Potter.
Ha-ha, my then 5 year old middle son preferred Charles Dickens and Jane Austin at that age, but he listened to them on tape rather than read them because of a physical vision disability for which he finally had surgery at age 16 when nothing else worked. But yeah, we didn’t know too many 3 year olds who were quoting Pride and Prejudice back then.
@hebegebe, first, I’ve always enjoyed your posts. Second, I agree that there really wasn’t a benefit to SET except for a free consultation with Michelle Muratori. Third, the Young Scholar program was so incredibly helpful for families in our income bracket. Back when we were involved, they gave financial assistance to about 10% of their families, and that made all the difference in the world for us.
I do think there are parents who want to “keep up with the Jones’” even if their kids aren’t ready to move ahead, but honestly, in my experience, there are way more students who are dying on the vine due to lack of educational stimulation, and those parents just want their kids to have an appropriate education.
Davidson was great for us as well. D went to their THINK program for 2 summers, and found others like herself (something that just wasn’t happening in school, and that is statistically understandable). She is still close to some of those students now that they are out of college – talks on the phone to one of them every couple of weeks still. We also got something from CTY – D missed SET by a hair (was too old when she took the SAT by a couple of weeks). But they did ask her to join the online group COGITO, and she thrived with that online community throughout her middle school years. Another group that she has kept in touch with for a long time.
So… we were helping her branch out, as the OP suggests (via summer and out of school groups), but that doesn’t offset the problem of pacing in the classroom.