Is Your Child Smarter than her IQ Score?
IQ tests are not all alike. Group tests are not equivalent to individual tests. Many gifted children do poorly on group tests due to noise, distractions, confusing directions, lack of interest, reading requirements, not understanding time limits, etc. Group tests are only screening tools—just like an eye chart is not the same as a full vision evaluation.
Even individual IQ tests may produce wildly different results. Recently, a very frustrated mother brought her daughter, a straight-A student, to us for a third opinion. The first IQ test (WISC-V) yielded a Full Scale IQ score of 128. No reading issues were reported—even though Mom was reading her daughter's history book aloud to her every night. Several months later, she took her daughter for a second assessment (Stanford-Binet V), and this time the girl scored 117! Again, no dyslexia was found. Did Mom say, "Oh well, my perceptions must be wrong"? No, she called Gifted Development Center. By this time, the girl was 16. We gave her the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) and her Verbal Comprehension Index was 145+, in the highly gifted range! We also established that she had a reading disorder.
Trust your gut. If an IQ score is lower than you anticipated, get a second (or third) opinion.