Center for Talented Youth

A CTY afternoon activity at LMU in Los Angeles

The Center for Talented Youth (CTY) is a gifted education program for school-age children. CTY was founded at Johns Hopkins University and by Dr. Julian Stanley in 1979. It was the first program of its kind to identify academically talented youths and provide learning opportunities. CTY is best known for its Summer Programs, where students take a wide variety of enrichment and/or accelerated courses in a fast-paced learning environment that is difficult to attain in traditional schools. CTY summer sites are located at many university campuses throughout the United States and serve over 9,000 students from all over the world each year.

Other Names

CTY has held several previous names. Dr. Stanley's research groups, the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) and the Program for Verbally Gifted Youth (PVGY), were combined in the early 1980s to form the Office of Talent Identification and Development (OTID). OTID was renamed Center for Talented Youth in a few years. Later, CTY became the Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth (IAAY). However, most students, parents, and schools preferred to call it CTY, and the name was changed back by the next Director.

Talent Search

Generally from October to February of each year, CTY's Talent Search recruits highly-able elementary and middle school students (who have scored at or above the 95th percentile on in-grade standardized tests) to qualify for CTY's academic programs. Applicants then take a standardized test that is designed for upper-level high school students, beyond the ability of most children their age.

• Students in the 2nd to 4th grades must take the CTY-administered School and College Ability Test (SCAT).
• Students in the 5th and 6th grades also take the SCAT; previously the PLUS test was used.
• Students in the 7th to 11th grades take the SAT or ACT through the College Board.

To qualify for CTY, a 7th grade student must score at roughly the 50th percentile achieved by graduating high school seniors. Younger students must pass somewhat lower thresholds based on grade level; applicants above 7th grade face correspondingly higher cutoffs.

CTY has another program, the Center for Academic Advancement (CAA), for gifted students in grades 7 to 11 who are in the top 2% of their age group. CAA is similar to CTY in most respects, aside from lower SAT score requirements.

CTY course eligibility is based on the math and/or verbal subscore, depending on the course's subject matter (e.g. science courses mainly require math, writing courses require verbal). Over 80000 students are tested each year, more than half of whom qualify for some portion of CTY or CAA.

CTY Talent Search officially operates in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York , Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Students from other states are served by sister programs such as TIP or CTD; however, CTY is by far the largest of these organizations. Students from every state, and dozens of countries, participate in CTY programs each year.

Summer Programs

File:JHUGilman.jpg

Johns Hopkins University's main campus.

The Summer Programs are CTY's hallmark and its most visible public face. Many people use the term "CTY" as a synonym for the 7th to 11th grade CTY summer program in specific.

CTY sites typically host a few hundred students each, divided into a few dozen course sections, for one or two three-week sessions. Separate sites and courses are offered for each level of students (grades 2-4, grades 5-6, older students CTY, and CAA). Sites for the youngest group are commuter programs; students attend only in the daytime. All of the other sites are residential programs; most students live in college dormitories during the session, although a few commute from home.

CTY Sites

CTY summer programs for the 7th grade and above are held at the following sites:

• Johns Hopkins University - Baltimore, Maryland
• Dickinson College - Carlisle, Pennsylvania
• Franklin & Marshall College - Lancaster, Pennsylvania
• Hawaii Pacific University - Kaneohe, Hawaii
• Loyola Marymount University - Los Angeles, California
• Princeton University - Princeton, New Jersey (Entering 10th-12th grades only)
• Siena College - Loudonville, New York
• Skidmore College - Saratoga Springs, New York

Because of the different campuses and colleges, the enforcement of rules can vary from campus to campus. The rules are notably stricter and tightly enforced at the Homewood Campus at Johns Hopkins University than at other campuses.

Other Summer Programs

• CTY has recently begun to hold residential programs for students in 10th to 12th grade. Six advanced courses are offered at Princeton University. This site has the same entry requirements as CTY for 7th to 11th graders; some courses also have prerequisites.

• In addition, the Civic Leadership Institute (CLI) (grades 10-12) hosts 80 students a year. An alliance between Northwestern's Civic Education Project and CTY with the same academic requirements as the Center for Academic Advancement, the CLI service-learning program was hosted last year at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland.

• CTY also offers a partnership program with the United Kingdom's National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY). Each year approximately three students from the United States and three students from the UK switch places.

Student Evaluations

Students are not given traditional letter grades. Instead, they are given page-long written evaluations composed by the instructor with input from the teaching assistant. The evaluations are signed by the instructor and sometimes by the teaching assistant and must be approved individually by the Site Director. The CTY Instructor's Handbook suggests writing three types of evaluations which correspond roughly to grades of "high pass," "pass," and "low pass."

These specific terms are not used, since they suggest traditional grading, but instructors generally follow the suggestions of the Handbook and write three boilerplate evaluations. Students are ranked into three groups and receive a corresponding evaluation to which personalized remarks specific to the student are added, i.e. "Your story, Motel Saturday Night showed both biting satire and keen understanding of U.S. oil policy." The difference between the three types of evaluations may be subtle.

CTY Culture

Main article: CTY Culture

Many CTY sites are home to their own unique traditions. The tradition varies according to site. Lancaster is often regarded as the most tradition-heavy CTY campus. Surprisingly, the JHU site has much less tradition than other sites, such as Lancaster and Carlisle.

Life in the CTY Summer Program

Dodgeball being played at CTY (also at LMU in Los Angeles)

Life during the three weeks at CTY is carefully structured. Students are required to be awake by a particular hour, though they have some flexibility in which time they go to breakfast before their first class of the day. (People in LMU, session 2, 2006 are known to wake up as early as 5:00 am in order to take a proper shower.) The first class period lasts approximately three hours, usually with a short break (around 7-15 minutes); students then eat lunch and spend two more hours in a classroom before participating in a "daily" and "weekly" activity from a list presented the previous evening. At the Carlisle site, students participate in two different "daily" activities instead. Afterwards, they proceed to dinner. Some evenings include talent shows or dances, but most have a two-hour "study hall" followed by recreational time, which is also known as Social Hour, Meet Market (at Carlisle and JHU), Quad Time (at Lancaster, Easton, and Skidmore), Social 45, or Social Night. Lights go out at 10:30, although students rarely go to sleep then. Lights out rules tend to be very strict, but students tend to use flashlights and find other loopholes in the rules to get around them.

Classes move at a very rapid pace, sometimes covering as much as one year of high school in three weeks. There are no grades, very little of what students might call "busywork", and depending on the site campus, no homework or somewhat of homework. At the end of the program, the parents of each student receive a personalized academic report from the instructor with a certificate.

• 8:00 - 9:00 Breakfast
• 9:00 - 12:00 Class
• 12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
• 1:00 - 3:00 Class (typically a lab session for students taking science courses)
• 3:30 - 5:30 Activities, unofficially referred to as "mandatory fun" (Activities are chosen the previous day. There are two blocks of activities, weekly ones, and daily ones.)
• 5:30 - 7:00 Dinner
• 7:00 - 9:00 Study Hall
• 9:00 - 10:30 Free Time
• 10:30 Lights Out

The schedules vary slightly at different sites. Lancaster, the site with the largest student body, has an earlier breakfast start time, and staggered lunches for different classes. Similarly, Activities are shorter at some sites, being 45 minutes long as opposed to a whole hour.

Most forms of external media and electronics are heavily restricted to maintain student focus on life at CTY. Few televisions, radios or newspapers are present, computers and video games are not allowed, and cell phones are not to be seen outside the dormitories. The few allowed forms of communication with the outside world include snail mail and phone calls just before lights out (or at the break of dawn). With this sort of isolation from friends back home, students can spend nearly ten hours a day in the company of newly forged friendships. Also, without any kind of daily news, students often lose track of time and, with so much content in classes and social interaction taking place, weeks at CTY can feel like months. (Although at the end of the CTY sessions, many students say that the three weeks seemed to be a day instead)

At some CTY campuses, such as the JHU Homewood campus, students are able to purchase late night meals. Some students order Chinese takeout or other foods to satisfy late night cravings as the cafeteria would be closed. One common quote is "Is the General better than the Colonel?" (Referencing to Generals Tsao's chicken and Colonel Sander's chicken or KFC)

Distance Education

CTY also offers Distance Education courses, with the same eligibility standards as the Summer Programs. CTY's Distance Education program began in 1983 with the Writing Tutorials through postal mail; that course has since migrated to email, and many other courses have been added. CTY now serves approximately 7500 distance students per year, and will likely surpass the Summer Program's head count at some point. Additional distance students can be enrolled by adding an instructor and a computer or two, whereas summer sites are rarely added or expanded.

Students usually receive assignments through the Internet and turn in their work the same way. The most common examples are by email and through a website, although many also use CD-ROMs and/or downloaded files. CTY also uses computer applications to teach science, math, and computer courses. Some courses, such as writing, require students to complete an assignment by a deadline before receiving a new assignment. Other courses, such as accelerated math, are individually paced; each student may complete as much material as they can within the given enrollment period.

Other CTY Programs

• Family Academic Programs, also known as Conferences, are collections of seminars and hands-on activities in various locations around the world.
• The Study of Exceptional Talent is a longitudinal study of Talent Search participants who scored 700 or above on the math or verbal section of the SAT before age 13.
• Imagine is an educational magazine aimed at middle and high school students.

Publicity

CTY was featured in a July 2004 article in The New Yorker magazine entitled "Nerd Camp," and Session 1 of 2005 at Lancaster is the setting for the upcoming (2006) movie production, also entitled "Nerd Camp." This movie is being written by Adam Stzykiel, and is being produced by Nickelodeon.

CTY Alums and Students

CTY is home to many students of great academic ability. Some academic recognitions for CTY students for 2005 include:

• 6 of 32 American Recipients of the 2006 Rhodes Scholarship
• 3 of top 10 finishers in the Intel Science Talent Search, including the first-place winner
• 2 winners of the Siemens Westinghouse Competition

Since 2000, 26 CTY alums have been Rhodes Scholarship winners.

In 2006, two students were contestants in the National Geographic Bee national-level competition.

There are also many alums attending Ivy League universities, MIT, Johns Hopkins University, Reed College, the University of Chicago, the California Institute of Technology, and Stanford University .

See also

• Johns Hopkins University
• Dr. Julian C. Stanley
• Shad Valley
• Centre for the Talented Youth of Ireland
• Center for Talent Development, Northwestern University
• Rocky Mountain Talent Search, University of Denver
• Talent Identification Program, Duke University

External links

• CTY Official Website
• RealCTY (Wiki CTY site)
• CTY Members: See who's going where next summer