<story><title>I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)</title><url>https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad-i-cant-answer-these_b_586d5517e4b0c3539e80c341</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jtms</author><text>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.</text></item><item><author>dnprock</author><text>This article is fun to read. Incidentally, my daughter just took a test for a gifted program. She didn&amp;#x27;t study for it as recommended by our school district. She scored 95% in one subject. But the qualified cut-off rate is 98%!&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;ll see this score is like shooting yourself in the foot. You&amp;#x27;re more likely selecting prepared test takers than gifted students.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TallGuyShort</author><text>I think there&amp;#x27;s a right and a wrong way to run these programs. Some schools just pick a couple of outliers and make it obvious they&amp;#x27;re outliers. If you&amp;#x27;re going to group some kids by ability for some classes, do it to everyone. Yes, a few kids are really advanced. A few others are almost there. Don&amp;#x27;t make the first group so uniquely isolated at the expenses of making the second group miss out on similar opportunities entirely. I see the benefit of keeping everyone together some of the time, but I&amp;#x27;m screaming inside when I see my daughter reading at a 3rd grade level next to kids who still don&amp;#x27;t know the alphabet, and her teacher has to keep them all in one big reading group. She has an alternative but it&amp;#x27;s strictly an addition to all her other work: which is how it was for me, so I got A&amp;#x27;s in the gifted program, and D&amp;#x27;s in my regular school work because it seemed pointless and stupid. My high school was only told about the D&amp;#x27;s so it took me 2 years to get back into Honors classes. Whoever designed that program was not &lt;i&gt;gifted&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Let everyone spend some time grouped by ability. Don&amp;#x27;t just burden them with more busy work. And please make sure the teachers running special programs have a clue what they&amp;#x27;re doing to kids...&lt;p&gt;edit: Furthermore, I always thought it pathetic that I went from being a very average student in 2 other countries, moved to America and was suddenly seen as a gifted genius who was years ahead of my peers in math and science. I&amp;#x27;ve obviously never seen it that way - I think kids are capable of for more than the American school system expects of them, but their intellectual growth is being stunted at a very young age.</text></comment>
<story><title>I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)</title><url>https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad-i-cant-answer-these_b_586d5517e4b0c3539e80c341</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jtms</author><text>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.</text></item><item><author>dnprock</author><text>This article is fun to read. Incidentally, my daughter just took a test for a gifted program. She didn&amp;#x27;t study for it as recommended by our school district. She scored 95% in one subject. But the qualified cut-off rate is 98%!&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;ll see this score is like shooting yourself in the foot. You&amp;#x27;re more likely selecting prepared test takers than gifted students.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;So, YMMV, but if I were a parent I&amp;#x27;d at least give a local GATE program a try. (But also sports.)</text></comment>