Well, it looks like the kids in New York City aren’t the only ones taking the OLSAT test for admissions into gifted programs. Out in California, there’s a program in Davis called AIM which also uses the OLSAT test for admissions into their gifted program. According to the article, it looks like 10% of the third grade students (56 out of 543) who took the OLSAT test scored high enough to be in the Davis School District’s AIM program.

As with the NYC Gifted and Talented test, the scores seem to be skewed in favor of children of Caucasian and Asian descent with very few Latino and African-Americans being represented as those who qualified. The Davis school board is now questioning if the OLSAT test is the right type of test to qualify kids for this particular gifted program in Davis. This has also been the ongoing debate in NYC where the NNAT-2 non-verbal test was introduced a few years ago but the outcomes of the the distribution of qualified students by ethnicity have remained virtually unchanged (mostly white and Asian and very few Latino and African American students).