What kind of test is the Gate testing in South California area?
Hello! GATE stands for Gifted And Talented Education. I graduated high school in 2005, but the first time I took the test, was in 1995, I believe. I was in the 3rd grade. GATE test is a standard competency test, testing your child’s skills in reading, writing and mathematics. I scored very high on my test, and I was put into the GATE classes. I was able to work as my own pace, which was faster than most of my peers, so I could learn more during the school year. I think it’s a great program. Some students need extra help, some are right at average, and some are advanced, so it’s great to offer the programs and help all students to work at their own pace. I don’t recall how long the test lasted, but it is divided into sections. It’s a fill-in-the-bubble type test. Nothing to worry about, and no reason to stress over it. Just encourage your child to be serious about the test. If he scores too low, just by not taking an interest, he could be withheld from advancing in his academics… and
They want to find out if your child is capable of critical thinking above his grade level. If he scores above a certain level, they give you the option of putting your child in a school or classroom with other advanced kids so the teacher can teach at their level instead of at the high, med and low levels of a normal public school class. Sometimes its just an option for more extracurricular stuff like music, cooking, foreign language, art.. etc. My 1st grade daughter just took the GATE test here in Central CA. She spent about an hour on a Saturday morning doing a scantron test with semi-abstract questions like “Which symbol is a straight line with arrows on each end” and then answers a-d had various versions of lines with something each end. An adult test proctor read the questions to them. She said it was fun and easy. Before the test, I called the school district and they told me they use the Otis Lennon School Ability test. I googled it and found sample tests for her to do. The samp
it depends on the district. I worked in a nor cal district and we used a combination of STAR scores, teacher feedback and the Raven test (which is a series of increasingly harder puzzles- kids don’t see it as a test, more like games) to identify students for GATE. Contact the GATE coordinator at your district or school and they should be able to either show you the test used, or at least give you detailed info.
