Davidson Academy in Reno is a special school for the profoundly gifted. Scores to qualify for acceptance include
- 145+ verbal and/or non-verbal subscore on the SB5 or DAS-II
- a 145+ on the FSIQ or at least two subscores (verbal comprehension, visual-spatial, fluid reasoning, quantitative reasoning) on the WISC-V
- exceeding both a minimum composite score and minimum on at least one subscore on the SAT at a given age (e.g. a 1580 with an 800 in math in 10th grade)
- exceeding both a minimum composite score and minimum on at least two subscores on the ACT at a given age (e.g. a 35 composite with a 36 in math and 35 in science in 10th grade)
So if you wanted to see an environment filled with the objectively most brilliant, more brilliant on average than even the top universities, here is a place to look.
Many students’ families moved states specifically to enroll their profoundly gifted children here. Demographically, it has a 2:1 male:female ratio, and the racial breakdown is 61.3% Asian, 21.4% White, 12.1% “multiracial” (I assume mostly Asian+White), 2.3% Hispanic, 2.3% Pacific Islander (huh?), and 0.6% Black.
Choice quotes from alumni:
“I think that something a lot of gifted students run into is being given busy work at other schools because people are like, ‘Oh, you can do this work so quickly, here is more work to do,’ which is not really conducive to learning. It’s very different here and I really appreciated that.” -Ming Li
“I think one thing, that in retrospect I really appreciate, but maybe was not so appreciative when I started was the intensity of the writing program. I think coming into the Davidson Academy, I was very much STEM. I liked reading, but I didn’t want to touch an essay at all. I hated writing, because I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Davidson has a very quick way of beating that out of you.” -Haydn
“On my first day at school, a stranger sat down next to me during lunch and started telling me about her favorite casino buffet, unprompted. Seven years later, that same stranger is still my best friend. When you grow up with the same group of peers, you all inevitably become (and remain) close friends…The culture of friendliness permeates every aspect of student life. It’s rare for DA students to lose contact after graduation.” -Andrea
Davidson Institute also runs Davidson Young Scholars summer camps and awards Davidson Fellowship scholarships. Years before the Academy opened, the Davidsons wrote a book called Genius Denied arguing that the profoundly gifted are profoundly underserved, using the scholars they’d seen to illustrate the point. One such case:
When Rachel was four years old, she told her mother she wanted to write a story. The little girl couldn’t physically write the words yet, so she asked her mother to write them down for her. Her mother agreed to do so and then marveled as Rachel dictated an elaborate ten-page tale called “The Time of Great Recise” about a recently orphaned heroine struggling with her grief. Rachel knew no word that meant “strife,” but also the process of overcoming it, so she coined “recise” to mean just that. She was too young and her ideas too big to be limited by the English language. For Rachel, growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, writing proved to be her own means of “great recise.” She was always different. When she played with other children her age, she wanted to talk about her Chronicles of Narnia books and the science fiction fantasy worlds she dreamed up, while they wanted to talk about toys. Troubled by this, she looked forward to school. She imagined there would be other children like her there, children who vacuumed up information, children who had hundreds of questions, children who loved to solve fascinating problems. So she watched the school bus from the window and looked forward to all she would learn. But school, too, lagged behind her mind. Rachel knew how to read already and read voraciously. By second grade the rest of her class was reading two-paragraph selections from a reader while she raced through the comprehension questions to devour a few more pages in her Madeleine L’Engle books. She used words her classmates didn’t understand, so she was the quirky child. In elementary school that was mostly okay. She came to class dressed as Jo March to tell the other eight-year-olds the plot of Little Women, and she soaked up their rapt attention. She produced a science fiction trilogy of short stories that earned her a place in her school’s gifted program, although all that meant was a few extra hours a week of word puzzles and the like. She read books on everything from politics to physics and formed opinions on world affairs that seemed strange coming from a curly-haired child. And some force kept compelling her to write. She would skip anything else to make the words that jumbled in her head appear on the page. Rachel’s parents knew she was a high-maintenance child— energetic, emotional, and very, very bright. Then they had her tested and discovered that her IQ (intelligence quotient) was so high, a score like hers occurred less than once in a thousand people. A small town like…
