Please glance, at least, at this document before reading this long post. It’s the reason I’m writing. I believe I would have been one of the children in this study, if I had been in the right place at the right time.
https://youngholm.com/py/assets/gross_exceptionally_gifted_children.pdf
I’ve always been introspective, but until a few years ago I had never examined my life systematically or in any detail. In March 2022, I decided to find out, if I could, why I had found my life so seemingly unsatisfactory. I started writing random autobiographical fragments at odd hours. This turned out to open floodgates of reminiscence, and I wrote over a hundred pages in the next two months.
I also dragged out the flotsam that had been accompanying me through all my moves from place to place. I had tried to weed this during each move, but there were still several boxes’ worth of materials I had never been able to part with, going back to things my mother had saved from my childhood. I found dozens of new-baby welcome cards from my parents’ church friends (apparently this was a thing in the 1940s), report cards from elementary school, mementos, travel diaries, a virtually complete archive of my freshman year at college, and much else. What I did not find, however, were my transcripts from high school, college, and graduate school, so to complete the record, I ordered them all.
It took several exchanges of email messages with Central Catholic High School to convince them that I really had graduated there (I wound up sending them a scan of the 1965 commencement program showing that I had been valedictorian). I finally got my transcript on April 1, 2022. An appropriate day, because when I examined it, I thought the universe was playing a joke on me. In a box labeled “IQ” were two entries. One entry said “158, California SF, 1/17/63”. The other said “160, Henmon Nelson – B, 11/63”. A little research showed that these were two standardized tests of mental ability from that era.
“California SF” is plainly the California Short-Form Test of Mental Maturity. The date shows that I took the test when I transferred into the school in the middle of my sophomore year. “Henmon Nelson – B” must be Henmon-Nelson Tests of Mental Ability, Form B, in its revised edition of 1957. The date I took this test implies that it was being given to all new juniors, probably as part of preparing for college applications. I found favorable reviews of both tests in the psychological literature.
I had always known I was smart. Other people sometimes treated me as though I was smart — which was not always a good thing in small-town America around 1960. I skipped a grade in elementary school, and my paternal grandfather constantly referred to me as “The Professor” (though that may just have been because I wore glasses from the age of eight or so). But no one ever told me the numerical result of any IQ tests, and aside from skipping a grade, I was never put on an accelerated track or offered advanced courses.
I hasten to say that 158 and 160 are just numbers typed by a school secretary in the mid-1960s. They may be typographical errors. They don’t entitle me to claim that my IQ is any specific number. A truly reliable IQ, to the extent that you give credence to IQ numbers, can’t be determined by a standardized written test given to a roomful of people in a couple of hours, as these undoubtedly were (I don’t remember them). For a reliable indicator, you have to be tested one-on-one, in an all-day session, by a psychologist with a PhD, at a cost of thousands of dollars. This is particularly true in the range of high scores, since the most popular written tests at the time (Wechsler and Stanford-Binet) had a cut-off of 160, according to my research. I suspect, but don’t know, that the Henmon-Nelson had the same cut-off, which would mean that a score of 160 actually means “minimum of 160”. (If your car’s speedometer only reads up to 100, and you pin the needle, you have no way of knowing if you’re going 100, 120, or 140 — at least, not based on that speedometer.)
Based on this and other evidence, though, I think it’s clear that I was one of the exceptionally gifted. The article I cite at the top of the post makes the point that gifted children don’t reach their potential — and, perhaps more importantly, lead happy, fulfilling lives — unless their gifts are appropriately recognized and nurtured. I’ve come to think that, although my life has been rewarding in many ways, it’s fallen far short of what it could have been.
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