Gifted or well prepared?

The New York City Education Department announced that it was changing part of its admissions exam for its gifted and talented programs last year. The Education Department said it would change one of the tests used for admission to public school gifted kindergarten and first-grade classes in order to focus more on cognitive ability and less on school readiness, which favors children who have more access to preschool and tutoring. The parents of various children prepares their child by using test prep and workbooks provided by  tutoring companies, working on skills like spatial visualization and serial reasoning, which are part of the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, or NNAT 2, the new gifted and talented test.

After reading this, I feel that children in Singapore face similar challengers. In the Singapore education system, children at primary 3 would be eligible to take a Gifted Programme entry test. If they were to past, they would be attending classes which are catered to them, providing them a large platform to further broaden their perspective and knowledge. It is a real pity as some children are not truly gifted but are trained and prepared by their parents to be gifted so that they would be able to enter the Gifted Programme courses. Some parents even went to the extend to actually send them to tuition classes which trains and prepares them to be gifted and to ace the entry test. However, when these kids enter primary 4, they would start to suffer as they would not be able to cope with the gifted programme courses and keep up to pace with those children who are really gifted and better in learning.