<p>My son tested at over 130 but struggled throughout school because of learning disabilities. When he was enrolling for his first high school classes the counsellors suggested he enrol in AP classes because he qualified based on his ‘testing’ scores - despite the fact his middle school grades were not high enough to allow him to enrol in AP classes. He ended up not doing the AP route - which for him was a good thing as he began to regain a little confidence by performing well in regular classes. Maturity kicked in and he developed his own ways of compensating for his learning problems. If we had made him do the ‘gifted’ program based purely on his ‘IQ’ and not taking into account the whole picture - well I am not sure he would have survived emotionally.</p>
<p>emeraldkity4, your daughter with the very high IQ, had problems at Reed because? Does your daughter do well in the subjects that are her strengths in the IQ test, and not so well in the other subjects?</p>
<p>EK~</p>
<p>I’m <em>really</em> surprised that your school district uses a group IQ test for placement into a gifted program! The group tests are supposedly much less accurate than an individual one administered by a trained professional according to the specific criteria for administration. In addition, our district uses an achievement battery in conjuction with the IQ test, though it is the IQ test which determines the placement.</p>
<p>I would disagree with this:
As I mentioned above, often the placement criteria has nothing to do with the kind/quality of the program offered or the ability/drive of the student to take advantage of what the program has to offer, and I have personallly observed many kids in our district’s GTC program who are serious underachievers, inlcuding the son of our own school psychologist. </p>
<p>Many of the kids who missed placement in the gifted program (but whose drive and motivation are exemplary) are the ones who are performing well during their college years.</p>
<p>In our district, one of the distinct advantages of being placed in gifted is the vastly different quality of the college counseling. Where all of the other students in our large school share just ONE GC, the GTC kids have benefit of the gifted teacher acting as their GC, and the ratio is much, much smaller between GC and students. In fact, our h.s. does VERY little with its gifted students other than offer these services, something which undoubtedly ALL students (and perhaps especially those NOT identifed as “gifted”) could benefit from. If a parent can use other means to acquire these services for a child (as in, private testing), I think s/he should do it.</p>
<p>~berurah</p>
<p>
I think you are a very astute parent to have understood this and resisted the recommendations based on YOUR OWN knowledge of YOUR OWN child! Was your son placed into an LD program, and if so, did he receive services?</p>
<p>~berurah</p>
<p>wa doesn’t mandate that gifted programing is available- although some funding is, Its certainly cheaper to administer group testing than individual testing which is probably why they do it.</p>
<p>I agree that placement doesn’t have a lot to do with the curriculum, but that was something I realized later. I also did observe several gifted classrooms in the district & I wasn’t too impressed which also helped me to decide to keep her in the private school.</p>
<p>I was right about it not being appropriate for her however I think. as she struggled with math, making simple errors & while she was at grade level, the district gifted program required all students to be at least two grades above grade level in all areas.</p>
<p>In Seattle they currently use the CAT, WASL or ITBS test for placement</p>
<p>
I know what you mean. Our program isn’t particularly impressive either. I thought our elementary program was fine (I had three through that one), and the program in grades 6-8 was pretty good, but h.s. essentially dropped the program. The gifted class was mostly used as a resource gathering tool for college stuff, but considering that about 99% of the kids remained in state at state schools or even community colleges, they could have done more with those four years, I think.</p>
<p>~b.</p>
<p>Group tests are simply unreliable, as are on-line “IQ tests”. </p>
<p>The problem with most testing for gifted programs is that many school psychologists only use certain subtests from the WISC (it is a long and thus expensive test to administer privately), and prorate the scores. Often times, the results of this type of adminstration are skewed, because one cannot see nuance or variability within domains without the full test. </p>
<p>This is why I scoff at gifted programs which claim to have large participation of kids with IQs over 130 or 140. It simply isn’t statistically possible to have that many kids with such high IQs in a standard population sample, and it always makes me suspect some error in administration of the test, whether it was on-line, group, or pro-rated WISC.</p>
<p>BTW, Dstark, the Stanford-Binet is not widely used anymore, as it has been almost completely replaced by the WISC, except for evaluation of profoundly gifted individuals, since the WISC tops out around 150, and the S-B V can reliably assess IQs up to near 180-200.</p>
<p>
That’s interesting, 'cause that’s what I thought too, but I <em>think</em> the last one I had tested (number 5) was given the S-B. Hmmmmmmm…</p>
<p>And ITA with this:
The number of kids being served in our gifted program (cutoff of 130) is much higher than 3% of the class.</p>
<p>~berurah</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you live in an upper-middle class neighborhood with lots of college-educated parents it wouldn’t be surprising to find that the IQ distribution is not normal.</p>
<p>^^We don’t. I’d say the distribution is very normal, with perhaps more of the parents not having any higher education.</p>
<p>"In an effort to give an explanation of the continuum of IQ (the bell curve), the teacher had “researched” it on the internet and had brought in some material that attempted to give a more familiar and functional context to this abstract material. So, she presented the IQ scale in 10-point increments (80-90, 90-100, 100-110, and so forth) and proceeded to inform the students about what kinds of careers they can expect to attain if their IQs fall within that certain range. For example, according to the teacher, the vast majority of teachers would fall into the “superior” range, and the vast majority of doctors would fall into the “gifted” range. Plumbers, on the other hand, would fall into the “average range.”</p>
<p><strong><em>HUH</em></strong>??? I was absolutely APPALLED at this overly simplified and in many ways innaccurate model that was presented to high school students!!! "</p>
<p>I don’t see your problem. In general, what the teacher said is true. Doctors are – on the whole – more intelligent by IQ-test standards – than are plumbers.</p>
<p>Does that mean that there are no plumbers who are brilliant? Of course not. Some brilliant people may choose to be doctors just like some MIT-graduates may choose to be car mechanics as are NPR’s Car Talk guys.</p>
<p>However, does that mean that there are doctors who actually have only average intelligence: Probably not because to take the difficult courses that doctors need to take, one needs to have a high level of intelligence.</p>
<p>While it’s possible for some people who lack natural brilliance to succeed in difficult fields through hard work and determination, there also are limits to this. A person whose intelligence has been accurately estimated at 60 isn’t going to become a nuclear physicist, no matter how hard that person works.</p>
<p>In saying all of this, it’s also important to stress that IQ reflects estimated intelligence on certain criteria. It’s possible for the estimate to be wrong, which can be due to the errors by the test administrator or illness, nervousness, lds, and other problems in the test taker. If the test is a valid test, with the exception of cheating, it’s virtually impossible for one’s IQ to be overestimated. However it’s not that difficult for an IQ to be a gross underestimate.</p>
<p>I haven’t been able to read every post, though read a bunch, and I guess all I can say is that I don’t know my kids’ IQ, nor my own, and what we don’t know hasn’t helped or hurt us. Maybe it is better that way. 
</p>
<p>Allmusic, and whoever wants to answer, if I score 140 on the WISC, am I correct in thinking I am more intelligent than somebody who scores 125?</p>
<p>Let’s cut to the chase. If student “A” scores higher in one of these tests compared to student “B”, is student “A” more intelligent than student “B”?</p>
<p>Do kids who score 140 end up as better students and accomplish more than students who score 125? Is there real evidence that suggest this is true?</p>
<p>When the teacher of Beraruh’s kid said certain IQs lead to certain jobs, there is real evidence that this is true. Right?</p>
<p>I think the problem is that the ‘cut-offs’ are arbitrary in many districts and they do vary, depending on where you live. The district where we lived when our kids were young essentially had a program that served kids who were in the 98th percentile and above. Three of my Ds went to the self-contained program from grades 5-8 which was wonderful. One D, in particular, is still in contact with many of her friends from those years and they hold reunions periodically, as they tended to scatter in high school. About 90% of them are now in grad, med, or law school. I was always of the opinion that a larger percentage of students could benefit by this wonderful program but the district was never interested in expanding the parameters.</p>
<p>Dstark, the answer to your question is no, not at all! The actual IQ of a person indicates potential, but not in any way capacity to tap and utilize that potential successfully. One can’t measure emotional intelligence the way we measure intellectual intelligence, and trust me, the former is at least as important as the latter.</p>
<p>People with average IQs and high emotional intelligence sometimes do much better in all ways than exceptionally bright people with poor emotional intelligence or people skills. I have known some superbly intelligent people who were unable to fulfill their promise and everyone’s expectations and were really quite unhappy. Their brilliance didn’t provide contentment or satisfaction.</p>
<p>There are simply too many factors that contribute to a happy and successful life, and inherent intelligence is merely one of them. </p>
<p>However, IMO, the people with strong IQs, the 125 crowd, with good people skills, have it all sewn up, since they are intelligent enough to accomplish whatever they want to do, and can manage the social networks to do so. I prefer that to the 150 IQs with poor EI, or the 95s with good EI. Kind of a duh, but that’s how I see it.</p>
<p>“Allmusic, and whoever wants to answer, if I score 140 on the WISC, am I correct in thinking I am more intelligent than somebody who scores 125?”</p>
<p>No. You would be correct in saying that you may be more intelligent than the other person on the factors that the WISC estimates. It’s possible that due to illness or other factors, the WISC underestimated the other person’s intelligence.</p>
<p>“Do kids who score 140 end up as better students and accomplish more than students who score 125? Is there real evidence that suggest this is true?”</p>
<p>I’m sure there’s no evidence of this. IQ only indicates one’s estimated intelligence. Theoretically a person with an IQ of 125 could do virtually any careers that a person with a 140 could do.</p>
<p>A person with a 140 IQ who is a lazy misanthrope is not likely to accomplish as much professionally as is a hard working, gregarious person with an IQ of 115.</p>
<p>Indeed, some research has indicated that people at the highest risk of dropping out of secondary school are the students with very high IQs and the ones with very low IQs.</p>
<p>I’ve read that the people whose IQs are about 125-140 may be the ones who based on their IQs can have the most options to be professionally successful. That’s because they are brighter than most people are, but their ways of thinking are still comprehensible to most other people. This also supports what Allmusic was suggesting. </p>
<p>The genius level people can have difficulty connecting with most other people because their ways of looking at the world can be virtually impossible for most people to comprehend. People who others consider to be weird aren’t likely to go far in life.</p>
<p>If I recall correctly, there is a strong correlation between IQ score and academic achievement and vocational achievement up to a certain point, I think around 125, then as IQ continues to rise, achievement doesn’t rise with it. That is because of all the other factors that have already been mentioned</p>
<p>This, of course, is group data, ymmv.</p>
<p>
The problem I had with the teacher’s presentation is that she didn’t give so much as a nod to 1.) factors other than tested “intelligence” that can enhance or encumber “career success,” 2.) What NJres said in post #13, which IMHO about sums up my objection, 3.) the fact that many kids in our area (and many others) come from families which lack the education/sophistication to realize that “professional educators” aren’t always right (or at least that they can be misguided and/or reflect their own biases in their teachings, and 4.) the examination of the question of what it is exactly that intelligence tests measure and how accurate or inaccurate a measure they may be.</p>
<p>Neither I nor anyone else (I think) would argue the point that in a general sense, the higher your intelligence, the more choices of careers you have. I would never argue that. What I had the problem with was the use of <em>such</em> concrete examples in such an authoritative sense. As in, “IF your IQ is such-and-such, THESE are the careers you can aspire to.” To kids who come from not-very-educated homes, these words will be taken literally…can you see that?</p>
<p>Even my D, coming from OUR home, was made to wonder if she had the “right stuff” to pursue her dream of being a physician. (She does.) </p>
<p>The material could have been presented in a more comprehensive way that was more reflective of the reality we see around us, IMHO.</p>
<p>~berurah</p>
<p>
O.K., just read through this again, and if these things that you say are true, then what the teacher told my D’s class was basically UNTRUE or at least oversimplified to the point of being relatively useless. Kids who view IQ as some “magic” number may think, “Oh, I’m only a 127, so I can’t aspire to a career as a doctor because I’m not in the “gifted” range!” as opposed to…“OH!! I see…with an IQ in the mid 120’s, I can do pretty much whatever I wish.” </p>
<p>If a more general statement had been given that reflected that the higher your level of intelligence, the more options you have available to you, I’d not have had an issue with what was presented. </p>
<p>~berurah</p>
<p>
Slap an extra 0 on those numbers and let’s talk about SAT scores. Is someone who scores a 1250 (old scale) on the SAT automatically more intelligent than someone who scores a 1400? I would tend to say no.</p>
<p>On average, someone with a higher score might tend to out-perform someone with a lower score. But that’s a description of group tendencies, and doesn’t say anything about the limits and capabilities of an individual person.</p>
<p>I think it’s valid to say “the majority of (this profession) has an IQ score in (this range).” But it’s not valid to turn it around the other way and say that an IQ score of (this range) restricts you to a career in (this profession).</p>