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This article is fun to read. Incidentally, my daughter just took a test for a gifted program. She didn't study for it as recommended by our school district. She

This article is fun to read. Incidentally, my daughter just took a test for a gifted program. She didn't study for it as recommended by our school district. She scored 95% in one subject. But the qualified cut-off rate is 98%! My eyes just rolled looking at that number. That means they only pick 98 and 99 percentiles. For a first grader to score that high, she needs to answer the exam perfectly. If you have some statistics training, you'll see this score is like shooting yourself in the foot. You're more likely selecting prepared test takers than gifted students. I congratulated my daughter on her score. We went out for dinner and got tasty pastries for dessert. Life is too short to waste our time on these dumb tests.

sytelus 7y ago
I doubt the value of gifted programs. All parents innately want their child to be "gifted" but they don't understand what this program really means. They basically just accelerate by full grade or two while raising the expectations for each kid to another level. This is unnecessary burden on kids with a high risk that they can lose confidence or even burn out at tender age not willing to learn anything any more. I think there are probably 1 in 1000 kids who are going to earn PhD by the age of 18. May be gifted program is great for them but for everyone else parents should probably actively avoid them.
- SpaceManNabs 7y ago
  gifted programs in lower income areas are often the only path for decent class rooms that kids there will have. The "standard" class rooms are often too interrupted, occasionally by violence. I once saw an 8th grader tackle the hell out of a large administrator. The 8th grader was giant too though.
- ip26 7y ago
  That's exactly what some kids need though. Forget about loaded terms like "gifted", some students just pick up the material more quickly and rapidly become bored to tears. Doesn't matter why- are they good at studying? Is the material presented in the way they learn best?- they need to be challenged.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > They basically just accelerate by full grade or two while raising the expectations for each kid to another level. That's...not accurate. Gifted programs tend to increase the degree of personalization more than anything. Yes, most people who qualify for gifted programs at probably going to end up targeting at least a full grade up in each core curriculum area, but the programs don't do a straight bump. > This is unnecessary burden on kids with a high risk that they can lose confidence or even burn out at tender age not willing to learn anything any more. Gifted programs are actually targeted narrowly at a segment that is more at risk of burning out by being subjected to the unmodified mainstream curriculum. > I think there are probably 1 in 1000 kids who are going to earn PhD by the age of 18. There pretty clearly are not.
  - pandapower2 7y ago
    I was part of two programs. First from ages about 8 to 12 then another from age 13 to 15. The program from 8-12 was what you described. Lots of random subject areas. Programming, history, chess, I learned how to build a mud brick hut (built a scale model and everything). Lots of self direction. The program from 13 to 15 wasn't like that. It was more of a straight bump. We approximately did 2 years worth of core curriculum in one year and were then a year ahead for the remainder. Unfortunately then at age 16 I and everyone else from that program re-entered the regular classrooms and had to do much of the same year's material again. It was really, really stupid.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - wccrawford 7y ago
    My elementary school "GIFTED" program didn't attempt to teach us at a higher grade level at all. Instead it introduced us to different ideas and challenges that normal classes didn't cover. It was everything from an egg-drop contest to programming to creating slides for a report to adopting a manatee to solving "logic problems".
- ajdlinux 7y ago
  I was accelerated by two full grades in primary school when my parents realised that _not_ asking about gifted and talented support was going to cause me mental health issues. My family and my school did _not_ raise their expectations of me unreasonably. I quite enjoyed the rest of my school life, where I performed quite well but I certainly did not have perfect grades or come top of every class. Didn't win the dux/valedictorian award in my graduating class of ~30 kids in my rural high school, that went to a regular non-accelerated classmate. I don't regret it in the slightest.
  - sytelus 7y ago
    What "mental health issues" you might have experienced? boredom? You were apparently comfortable working 2 grades above so I'd say you were good fit for those programs. Parents who push their kids in by doing massive prep might get different experience.
    - ajdlinux 7y ago
      I can't really remember my state of mind clearly, I was a 6 year old when I started partial acceleration in reading and maths in Kindergarten, and a 9 year old when I was generally accelerated from Year 3 to Year 5. My family tells me that I made it very clear that I was unhappy at the time though - mostly the boredom. Conversely, I know people who were recognised as gifted students but who weren't generally accelerated out of concern for their social skills or whatever, some of them ended up having problems later on and should probably have just been accelerated and pushed out to higher education faster. And I also know people who are pretty clearly gifted, but went through school in the normal fashion and were entirely happy with that, good for them. I think the key thing is it has to be about the needs of the child, not the egos of the parents. Anyway, point is - gifted programs are useful for the kids who need them. And as a rural kid with a limited selection of schools and little by way of gifted program resourcing, I'm glad for the handful of teachers who made my individualised educational plan happen regardless - their special ed programs need more support, not less.
  - Jverse 7y ago
    How did you get along with your older peers? An age difference of two years is quite a lot in primary school.
- btilly 7y ago
  Here is a data point for you. The high school dropout rate among kids with an IQ of 130+ is approximately 20 times the high school dropout rate among the general population. Gifted programs reduce that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_At-Risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_At-Risk for more data points.
- throwawaymath 7y ago
  It depends on the gifted program. I was in one in high school and rather enjoyed it, though it was a pretty wide range of "gifted" (top 10% of my age cohort). I wouldn't characterize my experience as raising the the grade, but rather by diving into different material alongside different people. The material was ostensibly advanced/sophisticated sure, but it was categorically different from what would be encountered in the higher grades at the same "level." A friend of mine was in a much more rigorous gifted program (through Stanford) and I think it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He had a very poor home life but he's phenomenally brilliant (he's one of a specific handful of people I've personally met who I use that term for). All he really enjoyed doing from the time he was 12 was reading math and physics books. Going through the gifted program put him on a path that exercised his talents in a way that he found personally very fulfilling. He ended up finishing undergrad at Harvard before the age most kids become sophomores, and then completed a PhD from Harvard before the age most people even begin one. Then he went on to work for the NSA and, later, a hedge fund. Those things probably look soulless to a lot of people, but he's very happy.
ganzuul 7y ago
Sounds like a doged bullet. You might however still want to consider not enroling her in a normal school since they will surely waste her talent.
- sytelus 7y ago
  So what is not "normal" school?
  - tachion 7y ago
    Private school? Home schooling?
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      Expensive both and you do have to handle making connections and socialization...
      - wongarsu 7y ago
        I agree on home schooling having a socialization problem. Private schooling is kind of the opposite: the most measurable effect of private schooling are the connections formed, followed by similar effects of having a more wealthy demographic.
        theandrewbailey 7y ago
        I was homeschooled for most of my pre-univeristy education. I disagree with the notion that homeschoolers have a socialization problem. In my mostly rural Ohio county of about 50,000 people, there were around 50 families homeschooling about 100 kids. There were regular events like drama and chess clubs. I never felt like I didn't get enough socialization.
felipemnoa 7y ago
>>She didn't study for it as recommended by our school district. Kind of reminds of those fortune telling scams. i.e. The cards that you deal yourself will tell you the future. They tell you not to do it a second time in a row though ( for obvious reasons) You showed too much respect for something not worthy of respect in my opinion.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> She scored 95% in one subject. But the qualified cut-off rate is 98%! > My eyes just rolled looking at that number. That means they only pick 98 and 99 percentiles. Either one of these is wrong, or they somehow managed to craft a test where the score percentage matches the score percentile, which while possible to engineer is somewhat improbable and also contradicts the next sentence: > For a first grader to score that high, she needs to answer the exam perfectly. Irrespective of one’s current grade level, it doesn't require answering an exam perfectly to get a 98%. It might to get a 98 percentile score (depending on what other people taking the score get). > If you have some statistics training, you'll see this score is like shooting yourself in the foot. If you have some statistics training you'll recognize the difference between percentages and percentiles and which of the former corresponds to a perfect score. The test-retest validity of IQ tests (which tests for gifted programs either expressly are or are equivalent to) is such that it's not unreasonable at all to think that people will consistently score at about the same place based on ability over a short time period (over a longer span there'll be some variation) and that being a prepared test taker isn't a particularly significant factor, though anxiety about testing or the particular test could depress scores and soothing that is the main benefit of test prep. Yes, the levels most districts use a gifted cutoff are very high (usually 97th-99th percentile). Yes, that means very few (1-3%) will make the cut. No, this doesn't mean the people that make the cut are just test-taking prodigies.
- usgroup 7y ago
  If the optimisation problem is “pick a set of kids that can finish the curriculum quicker as measured by standardised tests” then any effective screening test is likely to select for “test taking prodigies” since that is the leading measure. RE percentage vs percentile: I think you may be wrong here. Take for example, uni exams. 40% is the pass mark here in old Blighty. The exams are standardised and the 40% threshold is not a percentile. In fact, it makes almost no sense at all to stackrank every cohort of test takers. It wouldn’t be fair at all not comparable over time. I think the parent poster is correct. Doubtless the empirical distribution of real scores are used to decide cutoffs for grades, by 99% in the parents posts very likely refers to a percentage.
  - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
atian 7y ago
Many school gifted programs follow Mensa requirement of top 2 percentile. I'm not sure the % score was mapped directly to the questions answered correctly.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  There are somewhat few notable people from MENSA... It is not a great standard for giftedness, more of a smart people club. People who do things are more often than not either too busy to join this club or see no point in it.
  - marvin 7y ago
    I guess that means what you mean by 'gifted' or 'notable'. Being very creative, having the confidence to express this creativity and most importantly, being both capable and _willing_ to have a high workload over time is probably correlated to having high IQ, but I strongly doubt that they follow in lockstep. Perseverence and hard work seems to be more correlated to "success" than IQ. IMHO there's a lot of smart people that compromise their health and well-being by forcing themselves to work too hard at being notable, and in itself I don't think these are the best objectives to strive for in life.
  - throwawaymath 7y ago
    What I'm reading from your comment is that you have a strong, implicit association between "giftedness" and "notability" - perhaps the latter taking the form of socially recognizable achievement. Speaking as someone who was in a gifted program in my youth (and who knew others in more advanced programs), I would like to caution against this perspective. My achievements are not notable, and I would not use that as a heuristic for determining whether or not a particular program/standard is successful or useful. Yet I found my experience to be very positive. Despite the fact that not all programs are created equal, I would generally recommend a suitable one to any parent with a gifted child. I understand MENSA is a bit loaded since it can come across as pretentious, so let me reframe the example for you. Take a look at past winners of the Putnam exam. Most of them are not nearly as notable as cperciva[1], but they're all demonstrably gifted. Giftedness is not about being entrepreneurial or about how you apply your intelligence in a notable way. Programs designed for gifted people are not trying to create a class of people who are more impressive. In general, they try to foster natural talent in a way that cannot typically be accommodated in the modal classroom setting. ________________ 1. For those unaware I'm referring to Colin Percival, an HN user who designed scrypt and developed Tarsnap. He won the Putnam.
gozzoo 7y ago
98% sounds a lit like overfitting
jtms 7y ago
I was in the gifted program when I was in elementary school and I don’t recommend it. It took a kid like me who was already prone to social isolation and isolated him further. I voluntarily left the program after 2 years and was playing catch up socially and I wasn’t any better off academically. Don’t put your kids in that program.
- JimboOmega 7y ago
  I was awkward, and it was about the only place I could focus entirely on academics and be among peers that valued that. My identity is complicated (and queer) and while my adolescence would have been a mess no matter what, having something that I could work hard on and had meaning - grades - made a ton of difference. At a school where everyone was an awkward geek, I didn't stand out. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
- thaumaturgy 7y ago
  I was fortunate enough to get into a GATE extracurricular program when I was in elementary school in the East Bay, a long time ago. In my case, I got to socialize more with some peer groups, visit a planetarium, make oddball things, get a good grasp of the sciences way ahead of the regular school curriculum, and participate in a problem-solving program that influenced my thinking for the rest of my life. BUT: in retrospect, those programs are mostly for kids who just happened to be fortunate enough to be born into the right circumstances at the right time. East Bay public schools were pretty good at the time, I was born just in time to learn about computers just ahead of the rest of the world, I had a somewhat stable home life, and my family supported learning and nerdy hobbies. I was a social outcast for most of my youth too, but that had less to do with GATE and more to do with my family's obsession with being smarter than everyone else, which made me an insufferable, lazy little jerkwad. It took getting out into the world in my late teens to begin realizing just how much of an idiot I really was. So, YMMV, but if I were a parent I'd at least give a local GATE program a try. (But also sports.)
  - bayareanative 7y ago
    Did California's GATE actually have a purpose? I was in it for 13 years (~1982-1996) and it seemed completely and utterly pointless. No extracurriculars, no meetings, no resources... it seemed like a smart-kid inventorying service for (insert random conspiracy theory here). Worse, I was constantly pulled out of class to take IQ tests and then bored to death because I was 3 years ahead after coming from a private school that had phonics and aggressive material plans (Challenger).
rcxdude 7y ago
is the 98% a percentile or a percentage of available marks? In that case it does seem like a poorly designed test. Tests I've seen which are designed to discriminate those at the high end of ability tend to be much harder, not have pass requirements in terms of marks (they may still take the top 2 percent of the curve, but this will correspond to ~75% of available marks instead of the high 90%)
saagarjha 7y ago
I took the GATE exam in elementary school (which has a similar 98th percentile cutoff) and the test was an absolute joke. Lots of ambiguous pattern matching that I managed to cheese through because I had a decent sense of what the test "wanted" me to put down (FWIW, I didn't end up getting anything out of it, even though I scored in the 99th percentile, because the school closed the program the following year for "lack of funds"). Really: don't read too much into that test.
- csunbird 7y ago
  >because I had a decent sense of what the test "wanted" me to put down I think this is what they are actually looking for
  - wccrawford 7y ago
    I agree. The test was for pattern matching. The student succeeded.
nmca 7y ago
She may have dodged a bullet - some GATE programs are rubbish, others excellent and it's hard to know what you'll get.
Ensorceled 7y ago
That's weird that she was expected to study for it, sounds like it was just testing if she was "ahead of grade level". So yeah, doing it wrong. When my step kids were tested they were interviewed by a psychologist for a couple of hours and did various IQ and aptitude tests. The report was quite thorough.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  I mean, you could have a separate "prep test" which is an entirely different purpose and would have to be really super secret on questions and answers including timing. Essentially, this checks if you bribed the right people to have the answers for previous tests or even this one, connections and decent enough memory. Welcome to America's latest educational scam. A test to gauge progress is supposed to be almost fully secret and unpredictable to not bias for people cramming previous answers.
matwood 7y ago
I took the test in elementary school, and was in the gifted program for almost my entire public school life. I vaguely remember the test, and it doesn't seem like something that could really be studied for - practiced maybe. It was very IQ test like when I took it many years ago. Perhaps it has changed.
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
Is the test out of 100%? I did a maths exam once where the top score possible was 120% (ironic!). The idea was you could ordinarily complete only enough to get 100%, but if you did complete more you got the marks for it. Why don't they make it harder and differentiate more easily?
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > I did a maths exam once where the top score possible was 120% (ironic!). The idea was you could ordinarily complete only enough to get 100%, but if you did complete more you got the marks for it. Was your test developed by Spın̈al Tap? What is the purpose for doing a test this way?
empath75 7y ago
Gifted programs were mostly just designed to segregate white students from minority students.
hjk05 7y ago
You seem to have a bias in this case. Obviously the will accept higher scores before lower scores. It would make no sense to eliminate anyone who scored above 98% based on an assumed “they cheated or trained too much” assertion. Just to include the “addequately but not too good students” who are scoring around 95%, which must be objectively better because that’s where your daughter happened to land. In the alternate reality you would be on here complaining that your daughter didn’t get in even though she had a perfect score and instead a bunch of kids with only 95% got in... I hate to break it too you, but there’s no conspiracy or broken system, a lot of other kids just scored better than your daughter.

sytelus 7y ago

I doubt the value of gifted programs. All parents innately want their child to be "gifted" but they don't understand what this program really means. They basically just accelerate by full grade or two while raising the expectations for each kid to another level. This is unnecessary burden on kids with a high risk that they can lose confidence or even burn out at tender age not willing to learn anything any more. I think there are probably 1 in 1000 kids who are going to earn PhD by the age of 18. May be gifted program is great for them but for everyone else parents should probably actively avoid them.

SpaceManNabs 7y ago
gifted programs in lower income areas are often the only path for decent class rooms that kids there will have. The "standard" class rooms are often too interrupted, occasionally by violence. I once saw an 8th grader tackle the hell out of a large administrator. The 8th grader was giant too though.
ip26 7y ago
That's exactly what some kids need though. Forget about loaded terms like "gifted", some students just pick up the material more quickly and rapidly become bored to tears. Doesn't matter why- are they good at studying? Is the material presented in the way they learn best?- they need to be challenged.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> They basically just accelerate by full grade or two while raising the expectations for each kid to another level. That's...not accurate. Gifted programs tend to increase the degree of personalization more than anything. Yes, most people who qualify for gifted programs at probably going to end up targeting at least a full grade up in each core curriculum area, but the programs don't do a straight bump. > This is unnecessary burden on kids with a high risk that they can lose confidence or even burn out at tender age not willing to learn anything any more. Gifted programs are actually targeted narrowly at a segment that is more at risk of burning out by being subjected to the unmodified mainstream curriculum. > I think there are probably 1 in 1000 kids who are going to earn PhD by the age of 18. There pretty clearly are not.
- pandapower2 7y ago
  I was part of two programs. First from ages about 8 to 12 then another from age 13 to 15. The program from 8-12 was what you described. Lots of random subject areas. Programming, history, chess, I learned how to build a mud brick hut (built a scale model and everything). Lots of self direction. The program from 13 to 15 wasn't like that. It was more of a straight bump. We approximately did 2 years worth of core curriculum in one year and were then a year ahead for the remainder. Unfortunately then at age 16 I and everyone else from that program re-entered the regular classrooms and had to do much of the same year's material again. It was really, really stupid.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- wccrawford 7y ago
  My elementary school "GIFTED" program didn't attempt to teach us at a higher grade level at all. Instead it introduced us to different ideas and challenges that normal classes didn't cover. It was everything from an egg-drop contest to programming to creating slides for a report to adopting a manatee to solving "logic problems".
ajdlinux 7y ago
I was accelerated by two full grades in primary school when my parents realised that _not_ asking about gifted and talented support was going to cause me mental health issues. My family and my school did _not_ raise their expectations of me unreasonably. I quite enjoyed the rest of my school life, where I performed quite well but I certainly did not have perfect grades or come top of every class. Didn't win the dux/valedictorian award in my graduating class of ~30 kids in my rural high school, that went to a regular non-accelerated classmate. I don't regret it in the slightest.
- sytelus 7y ago
  What "mental health issues" you might have experienced? boredom? You were apparently comfortable working 2 grades above so I'd say you were good fit for those programs. Parents who push their kids in by doing massive prep might get different experience.
  - ajdlinux 7y ago
    I can't really remember my state of mind clearly, I was a 6 year old when I started partial acceleration in reading and maths in Kindergarten, and a 9 year old when I was generally accelerated from Year 3 to Year 5. My family tells me that I made it very clear that I was unhappy at the time though - mostly the boredom. Conversely, I know people who were recognised as gifted students but who weren't generally accelerated out of concern for their social skills or whatever, some of them ended up having problems later on and should probably have just been accelerated and pushed out to higher education faster. And I also know people who are pretty clearly gifted, but went through school in the normal fashion and were entirely happy with that, good for them. I think the key thing is it has to be about the needs of the child, not the egos of the parents. Anyway, point is - gifted programs are useful for the kids who need them. And as a rural kid with a limited selection of schools and little by way of gifted program resourcing, I'm glad for the handful of teachers who made my individualised educational plan happen regardless - their special ed programs need more support, not less.
- Jverse 7y ago
  How did you get along with your older peers? An age difference of two years is quite a lot in primary school.
btilly 7y ago
Here is a data point for you. The high school dropout rate among kids with an IQ of 130+ is approximately 20 times the high school dropout rate among the general population. Gifted programs reduce that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_At-Risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_At-Risk for more data points.
throwawaymath 7y ago
It depends on the gifted program. I was in one in high school and rather enjoyed it, though it was a pretty wide range of "gifted" (top 10% of my age cohort). I wouldn't characterize my experience as raising the the grade, but rather by diving into different material alongside different people. The material was ostensibly advanced/sophisticated sure, but it was categorically different from what would be encountered in the higher grades at the same "level." A friend of mine was in a much more rigorous gifted program (through Stanford) and I think it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He had a very poor home life but he's phenomenally brilliant (he's one of a specific handful of people I've personally met who I use that term for). All he really enjoyed doing from the time he was 12 was reading math and physics books. Going through the gifted program put him on a path that exercised his talents in a way that he found personally very fulfilling. He ended up finishing undergrad at Harvard before the age most kids become sophomores, and then completed a PhD from Harvard before the age most people even begin one. Then he went on to work for the NSA and, later, a hedge fund. Those things probably look soulless to a lot of people, but he's very happy.

ganzuul 7y ago

Sounds like a doged bullet. You might however still want to consider not enroling her in a normal school since they will surely waste her talent.

sytelus 7y ago
So what is not "normal" school?
- tachion 7y ago
  Private school? Home schooling?
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Expensive both and you do have to handle making connections and socialization...
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      I agree on home schooling having a socialization problem. Private schooling is kind of the opposite: the most measurable effect of private schooling are the connections formed, followed by similar effects of having a more wealthy demographic.
      - theandrewbailey 7y ago
        I was homeschooled for most of my pre-univeristy education. I disagree with the notion that homeschoolers have a socialization problem. In my mostly rural Ohio county of about 50,000 people, there were around 50 families homeschooling about 100 kids. There were regular events like drama and chess clubs. I never felt like I didn't get enough socialization.

felipemnoa 7y ago

>>She didn't study for it as recommended by our school district. Kind of reminds of those fortune telling scams. i.e. The cards that you deal yourself will tell you the future. They tell you not to do it a second time in a row though ( for obvious reasons) You showed too much respect for something not worthy of respect in my opinion.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> She scored 95% in one subject. But the qualified cut-off rate is 98%! > My eyes just rolled looking at that number. That means they only pick 98 and 99 percentiles. Either one of these is wrong, or they somehow managed to craft a test where the score percentage matches the score percentile, which while possible to engineer is somewhat improbable and also contradicts the next sentence: > For a first grader to score that high, she needs to answer the exam perfectly. Irrespective of one’s current grade level, it doesn't require answering an exam perfectly to get a 98%. It might to get a 98 percentile score (depending on what other people taking the score get). > If you have some statistics training, you'll see this score is like shooting yourself in the foot. If you have some statistics training you'll recognize the difference between percentages and percentiles and which of the former corresponds to a perfect score. The test-retest validity of IQ tests (which tests for gifted programs either expressly are or are equivalent to) is such that it's not unreasonable at all to think that people will consistently score at about the same place based on ability over a short time period (over a longer span there'll be some variation) and that being a prepared test taker isn't a particularly significant factor, though anxiety about testing or the particular test could depress scores and soothing that is the main benefit of test prep. Yes, the levels most districts use a gifted cutoff are very high (usually 97th-99th percentile). Yes, that means very few (1-3%) will make the cut. No, this doesn't mean the people that make the cut are just test-taking prodigies.

usgroup 7y ago
If the optimisation problem is “pick a set of kids that can finish the curriculum quicker as measured by standardised tests” then any effective screening test is likely to select for “test taking prodigies” since that is the leading measure. RE percentage vs percentile: I think you may be wrong here. Take for example, uni exams. 40% is the pass mark here in old Blighty. The exams are standardised and the 40% threshold is not a percentile. In fact, it makes almost no sense at all to stackrank every cohort of test takers. It wouldn’t be fair at all not comparable over time. I think the parent poster is correct. Doubtless the empirical distribution of real scores are used to decide cutoffs for grades, by 99% in the parents posts very likely refers to a percentage.
- 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

atian 7y ago

Many school gifted programs follow Mensa requirement of top 2 percentile. I'm not sure the % score was mapped directly to the questions answered correctly.

AstralStorm 7y ago
There are somewhat few notable people from MENSA... It is not a great standard for giftedness, more of a smart people club. People who do things are more often than not either too busy to join this club or see no point in it.
- marvin 7y ago
  I guess that means what you mean by 'gifted' or 'notable'. Being very creative, having the confidence to express this creativity and most importantly, being both capable and _willing_ to have a high workload over time is probably correlated to having high IQ, but I strongly doubt that they follow in lockstep. Perseverence and hard work seems to be more correlated to "success" than IQ. IMHO there's a lot of smart people that compromise their health and well-being by forcing themselves to work too hard at being notable, and in itself I don't think these are the best objectives to strive for in life.
- throwawaymath 7y ago
  What I'm reading from your comment is that you have a strong, implicit association between "giftedness" and "notability" - perhaps the latter taking the form of socially recognizable achievement. Speaking as someone who was in a gifted program in my youth (and who knew others in more advanced programs), I would like to caution against this perspective. My achievements are not notable, and I would not use that as a heuristic for determining whether or not a particular program/standard is successful or useful. Yet I found my experience to be very positive. Despite the fact that not all programs are created equal, I would generally recommend a suitable one to any parent with a gifted child. I understand MENSA is a bit loaded since it can come across as pretentious, so let me reframe the example for you. Take a look at past winners of the Putnam exam. Most of them are not nearly as notable as cperciva[1], but they're all demonstrably gifted. Giftedness is not about being entrepreneurial or about how you apply your intelligence in a notable way. Programs designed for gifted people are not trying to create a class of people who are more impressive. In general, they try to foster natural talent in a way that cannot typically be accommodated in the modal classroom setting. ________________ 1. For those unaware I'm referring to Colin Percival, an HN user who designed scrypt and developed Tarsnap. He won the Putnam.

gozzoo 7y ago

98% sounds a lit like overfitting

jtms 7y ago

I was in the gifted program when I was in elementary school and I don’t recommend it. It took a kid like me who was already prone to social isolation and isolated him further. I voluntarily left the program after 2 years and was playing catch up socially and I wasn’t any better off academically. Don’t put your kids in that program.

JimboOmega 7y ago
I was awkward, and it was about the only place I could focus entirely on academics and be among peers that valued that. My identity is complicated (and queer) and while my adolescence would have been a mess no matter what, having something that I could work hard on and had meaning - grades - made a ton of difference. At a school where everyone was an awkward geek, I didn't stand out. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
thaumaturgy 7y ago
I was fortunate enough to get into a GATE extracurricular program when I was in elementary school in the East Bay, a long time ago. In my case, I got to socialize more with some peer groups, visit a planetarium, make oddball things, get a good grasp of the sciences way ahead of the regular school curriculum, and participate in a problem-solving program that influenced my thinking for the rest of my life. BUT: in retrospect, those programs are mostly for kids who just happened to be fortunate enough to be born into the right circumstances at the right time. East Bay public schools were pretty good at the time, I was born just in time to learn about computers just ahead of the rest of the world, I had a somewhat stable home life, and my family supported learning and nerdy hobbies. I was a social outcast for most of my youth too, but that had less to do with GATE and more to do with my family's obsession with being smarter than everyone else, which made me an insufferable, lazy little jerkwad. It took getting out into the world in my late teens to begin realizing just how much of an idiot I really was. So, YMMV, but if I were a parent I'd at least give a local GATE program a try. (But also sports.)
- bayareanative 7y ago
  Did California's GATE actually have a purpose? I was in it for 13 years (~1982-1996) and it seemed completely and utterly pointless. No extracurriculars, no meetings, no resources... it seemed like a smart-kid inventorying service for (insert random conspiracy theory here). Worse, I was constantly pulled out of class to take IQ tests and then bored to death because I was 3 years ahead after coming from a private school that had phonics and aggressive material plans (Challenger).

rcxdude 7y ago

is the 98% a percentile or a percentage of available marks? In that case it does seem like a poorly designed test. Tests I've seen which are designed to discriminate those at the high end of ability tend to be much harder, not have pass requirements in terms of marks (they may still take the top 2 percent of the curve, but this will correspond to ~75% of available marks instead of the high 90%)

saagarjha 7y ago

I took the GATE exam in elementary school (which has a similar 98th percentile cutoff) and the test was an absolute joke. Lots of ambiguous pattern matching that I managed to cheese through because I had a decent sense of what the test "wanted" me to put down (FWIW, I didn't end up getting anything out of it, even though I scored in the 99th percentile, because the school closed the program the following year for "lack of funds"). Really: don't read too much into that test.

csunbird 7y ago
>because I had a decent sense of what the test "wanted" me to put down I think this is what they are actually looking for
- wccrawford 7y ago
  I agree. The test was for pattern matching. The student succeeded.

nmca 7y ago

She may have dodged a bullet - some GATE programs are rubbish, others excellent and it's hard to know what you'll get.

Ensorceled 7y ago

That's weird that she was expected to study for it, sounds like it was just testing if she was "ahead of grade level". So yeah, doing it wrong. When my step kids were tested they were interviewed by a psychologist for a couple of hours and did various IQ and aptitude tests. The report was quite thorough.

AstralStorm 7y ago
I mean, you could have a separate "prep test" which is an entirely different purpose and would have to be really super secret on questions and answers including timing. Essentially, this checks if you bribed the right people to have the answers for previous tests or even this one, connections and decent enough memory. Welcome to America's latest educational scam. A test to gauge progress is supposed to be almost fully secret and unpredictable to not bias for people cramming previous answers.

matwood 7y ago

I took the test in elementary school, and was in the gifted program for almost my entire public school life. I vaguely remember the test, and it doesn't seem like something that could really be studied for - practiced maybe. It was very IQ test like when I took it many years ago. Perhaps it has changed.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago

Is the test out of 100%? I did a maths exam once where the top score possible was 120% (ironic!). The idea was you could ordinarily complete only enough to get 100%, but if you did complete more you got the marks for it. Why don't they make it harder and differentiate more easily?

mieseratte 7y ago
> I did a maths exam once where the top score possible was 120% (ironic!). The idea was you could ordinarily complete only enough to get 100%, but if you did complete more you got the marks for it. Was your test developed by Spın̈al Tap? What is the purpose for doing a test this way?

empath75 7y ago

Gifted programs were mostly just designed to segregate white students from minority students.

hjk05 7y ago

You seem to have a bias in this case. Obviously the will accept higher scores before lower scores. It would make no sense to eliminate anyone who scored above 98% based on an assumed “they cheated or trained too much” assertion. Just to include the “addequately but not too good students” who are scoring around 95%, which must be objectively better because that’s where your daughter happened to land. In the alternate reality you would be on here complaining that your daughter didn’t get in even though she had a perfect score and instead a bunch of kids with only 95% got in... I hate to break it too you, but there’s no conspiracy or broken system, a lot of other kids just scored better than your daughter.