In 2006, the city awarded a five-year, $5.3 million contract to Harcourt Assessment to standardize the hodgepodge of admissions standards for the more than 130 gifted programs in the city.  In the first year that test was administered, teachers were also asked to fill out a qualitative rating sheet for students that would be considered along with the results on the standardized test, known as the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat. The sheet, known as the Gifted Rating Scales, measured intellectual, academic, motivational, creative, leadership and artistic talent.  The city was praised for using multiple criteria to assess giftedness, in keeping with national recommended practice for gifted assessment. But the city’s use of the rating scales also led to an administrative disaster, education officials recalled this week. Teachers failed to turn in the rating sheets for 3,000 students on time, and some teachers said they did not feel comfortable filling out the forms, because parents could request to see them and question them.  The city ended up dropping the rating scales after one year in favor of a second test, the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, which judges early childhood knowledge like shapes and colors, and is easy to prepare students for. But arguably, it is not a gifted measure, but rather a measure of school readiness, as its name indicates.  The difficulty of using a qualitative measure weighs on city officials’ minds as they prepare the outlines of a new testing contract that will go out for competitive bidding to the nation’s testing publishers in the fall. Cost is another key factor.  Because the city wants to keep the testing process free, the tests are administered by teachers, a much cheaper method than the psychologist-administered intelligence tests of the sort used for private schools, which cost hundreds of dollars per student.  Early testing is something else the city wants to maintain. A number of the city’s most treasured schools for the gifted — like Anderson, NEST+m and Lower Lab — begin in kindergarten, and the city said it did not want to tinker with those programs, which are popular with middle-class parents. Waiting until later grades to start gifted classes and schools, city officials said, would also present a daunting logistical challenge, with children moving from school to school in the middle of their elementary years.  This despite the fact that many experts say preschool intelligence testing is less accurate than testing once school is under way, in part due to the strong impact of nurture on the early acquisition of skills. On the other hand, the city’s lower-than-average cut-off scores for gifted programs — the equivalent of 120 I.Q., or the 90th national percentile, rather than the 130 I.Q. used by most gifted programs — helps ameliorate this variability, some experts said. (The city tried using a higher standard, but amended it in 2008 after fewer students qualified, causing an outcry among parents in some districts.)  City officials said they hoped that advances in psychometrics since the last testing contract could lead to a fairer test.  And in fact, there have been advances in the last decade, particularly in two aspects of testing — new nonverbal aptitude tests, in which test examiners use pantomime instead of verbal directions to take students through the patterns and logic questions on the exam; and in item-response theory, which determines test validity question by question, instead of for the test as a whole, testing experts said.  But even with the advances, staying with a testing-only model would be unlikely to correct for the problem of low minority representation in the gifted program, some experts said, drawing on evidence from around the country. Currently 44 percent of children in New York City’s gifted programs are white, compared with 15 percent in the overall school population.  “By using standardized tests, you are going to get predominantly white kids, that come from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds,” said Tonya R. Moon, a professor at the University of Virginia and principal investigator for the National Research Center on the Gifted.  “There is no process that is perfect, and tests can be biased, so you have to put in mechanisms to control for them,” she said.  Susan K. Johnsen, a professor at Baylor University who has developed a nonverbal gifted test, was one of several experts who said the city should use multiple measures to assess giftedness, such as student work and teacher observation, even if it was more expensive or difficult to do so.  “There is no single test that can do it all,” Dr. Johnsen said. “You might be able to find an array of assessments that might be able to do a good job of recognizing children’s talents, but I don’t think there is a test that is a magic bullet, or even a combination of quantitative tests that are.”  While increasing diversity in the programs is an issue, education officials have been eager to dispel any suggestion that the gifted admissions process would somehow be diluted to promote it.  “We are not looking for a test that identifies qualities other than giftedness in young children,” said David Cantor, press secretary for the city’s Department of Education. “Our responsibility remains ensuring that gifted students are properly identified and placed in programs they need to learn best.”  A version of this article appears in print on June 30, 2010, on Page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: City Faces Many Challenges In Search for New Gifted Test. 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The current test is valid only for children 4 and older, but a new test could work for even younger children, allowing the city to speed up the admissions calendar.