Autism quotient test

Monday 15 September 2003 — This is more than 21 years old. Be careful.

Newsweek has an Autism quotient test. Answer 50 questions to see where you land on the autism spectrum. I scored 23 (just a tad too high for the average category). My wife Sue scored 15 (average for women). My autistic son scored 43 (quite high).

Of course, this test is for typical people, to measure their slight differences in position on the scale. The irony is that some questions just won’t even apply to severe autistics. For example, “I find it easy to remember phone numbers” is obviously trying to get at someone’s attention to detail and facility with numbers. Answering “agree” to that should put you higher up the scale. But if a kid has never tried to memorize phone numbers, or has difficulty with it because of their limited language, how would they answer, and how would that affect their score?

Comments

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Ben Langhinrichs 8:19 PM on 15 Sep 2003
Got a 21. Not sure what it means, but it still in average range, I guess.
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andrew 9:58 PM on 15 Sep 2003
I got a 6. I thought that I would have scored higher.
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caiuschen 10:42 PM on 15 Sep 2003
25, but I do think that the questions were not always the best.
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Richard Schwartz 6:31 AM on 16 Sep 2003
23 for me, too. Interesting.
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Bob 9:28 AM on 16 Sep 2003
I took the test last night and got a 23. I just ran through it again thinking a bit more carefully about what was being asked and got a 17.

I didn't like the wording of several of the questions. I can easily imagine a range of +/- 10 points for my results depending on how I interpret questions like "I notice patterns in things all the time" and "I tend to notice details that others do not". The first question uses an absolute modifier "all the time" and the second uses a relative modifier "tend".

--bob

P.S. If you give the same answer across the board for each of the 50 questions (e.g. "Slightly Disagree") you always get 25. The fact that I went to the trouble to try that means that I'm in the obsessive-compulsive spectrum or that I'm just a wise-ass programmer type. ;-)
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Laurent 1:38 AM on 17 Sep 2003
I do not understand why we would categorize people based on test. 50 questions to define a human brain, this seems a little bit simple.
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damien 10:39 PM on 17 Sep 2003
Got an 18. I dominated the test.
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Paul 5:36 PM on 13 Oct 2009
I scored 37 points, my wife thinks i show signs of being slightly autisic, i dont understand how she thinks this but she does. I have never been diagnosed with autism but i have never been tested for it either, i dont know if that means no-one ever suspected me to be autisic or whetehr anyone cared enough, i was just a troubled kid i guess and this test is probably just a coincidence, i dont really know.

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