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Why wouldn't you buy a WPPSI?
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Anonymous
LOL! |
Anonymous
That is sooo dumb. They obviously have a scientific way of catching a cheat. |
Anonymous
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Newbie here - let me ask a basic question:
Is it actually the case that most kids applying to the top schools (BIG 3, FAB 4, FAMOUS 5, whatever) are in the 99th percentile in their overall IQs? I can see that Washington DC kids probably score much higher than the national averages, but still. 99th percentile for everyone just seems a bit too high. Does anyone have a more detailed sense of where the numbers actually lie? |
Anonymous
I don't think it is true. I have a neighbor who works in admissions at GDS. Neighbor once asked me (a psychologist) if I knew anything about a specific testing practice, because an unusually high percentage of applicants tested there were at the 99th %ile. I took that to mean that most kids applying are not that high (but I wouldn't be surprised if the majority are in the 90's). |
Anonymous
| Newbie poster with the question re WPPSI percentiles. Thanks PP. That makes a lot of sense. As "educated" and "dedicated" as parents in the DC area may be, 99 percentile scores for everyone seems a bit too high. I agree too that most applicants are probably 90th plus percentiles. A quick scan of previous threads on this issue suggests that there may be a few successful applicants in the 80s but these seem to be relatively few in number (even smaller than those who claim to have been rejected with scores in the 99 plus range). |
Anonymous
| I'm curious to know - is there anybody wiling to 'fess up that they "prepped" their kid (in a major sense) and ended up with a 99%? These threads keep suggesting that this is common practice, but I really can't see how you could take an 80% kid and turn them into a 99% kid. Am I missing something? |
Anonymous
| I believe that is right as well - I can't imagine that you can turn even an low 90s kid into a 99 short of having the actual questions in hand and going over them. I am not even sure that it is a given set of questions that everyone receives - so if the testers are pulling questions out of a larger set of questions that parents do not have access to, it would seem difficult to raise scores by a lot even with some sort of "prep". |
Anonymous
| I am stunned by what I'm not seeing in this post. One word ETHICS. I never cheated in my life, not because i was afraid of getting caught, but because it is WRONG!!!!! |
Anonymous
| True PP. But the response you will get is "what is prep?". Is playing with jigsaw puzzles prep? Is asking them questions involving logic prep? |
Anonymous
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I posted about Beauvoir. I was just kidding. Sometimes I like to say something totally insane on these kinds of threads just to get a reaction. I like to think of all the Beauvoir applicants sweating it out over their prepped kids.
Before you judge me (but go ahead) remember the thread title. |
Anonymous
But the title of the thread is "why wouldn't you buy a WPPSI?" not "why wouldn't you prep your child?" And I agree, buying the test to prep a child is just ethically wrong, and I would not do it. |
Anonymous
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I'm not all that surprised that 3- to 5-year-olds in this area score so high. I'd be a lot more surprised if the 6th and 9th grade applicants score so high. A lot of what's going on for the younger kids is simply having educated (read DC-type) parents who talk to their small kids with biggish words, do lots of activities with their kids (yes, jigsaws, blocks), put out the paints, and the rest of "enrichment".
By middle and high school, these things tend to shake out. I've heard that IQ tests aren't reliable until 3rd or 4th grade. So maybe what I'm wondering is, are the WPPSI tests effective at capturing actual "IQ"? What is the WPPSI testing, really, that's different from what the tests of older kids are capturing. (Which could possibly lead to a discussion of whether any test of young or older kids really gets at IQ, but let's not go there.) |
Anonymous
That's a subject open to lots of debate. I got interested in it a few months ago, and read about 5-6 academic studies of that question (and abstracts for about 10-15 more studies). After all that, my best sense is that WPPSI and similar tests are moderately accurate in predictions. At the low end, some studies suggest they're only about 25-40% reliable. But other studies suggest they're closer to 60-80% reliable (especially if you focus on the verbal scores rather than the performance scores). Most studies I read seem to fall in that (admittedly broad) range. On one hand, this anything less than 50% seems pretty unreliable when you're thinking about a particular kid, because you might only have a 50/50 view of how the kid might score as she gets older. But on the other hand, it's pretty amazing that you can look at how a three-year-old scored on a test, and accurately predict about 50% of the time how she's going to score on a similar test 10 years later. That's especially amazing when you think of all the variation in environment/nurture that these kids will experience over the next 10 years. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, the studies are pretty fascinating. |
Anonymous
| Thanks for that, I'm interested in the research too. I'm wondering, what does "50% reliable" mean? Does that mean that if your kid scored, say, 75% on the WPSSI, then there's a 50% chance that they will score 75% again on an IQ test at age 8? Or is there a range of about 50% around the 75% score (from 50% to 100%)? |
Anonymous
| More the former than the latter. But it's really even more complex than that. The studies use various correlation measures that can be challenging for non-statisticians like me. |