What are your scores on the "Short Autism Screening Test?"

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At first I thought maybe the test was loaded to catch people out on that kind of basis, but it seems not. Rather simplistically, you just get 2 points if you have the trait now, and 1 further point if you had it when you were young. Considering that a diagnosis is always withheld if the client has no current symptoms, why would they get any points at all for past symptoms that no longer occur? I guess the authors would argue that none of that mattered as long as their test correlated well with the actual diagnosis of people who took it, but to my mind, if the analysis of the screening test itself shows good evidence that it's unlikely to work very well, it suggests that there's something wrong with their statistical comparison with the actual diagnosis. Whatever the reported stats say, you know something's fishy if somebody claims that tossing a coin is a good screening test for autism. When I worked in medical research, I saw researchers cherry-picking the statistical tests that made their results look good, and I saw the pressure that was on them to do such things.

I'd have thought that for a lifelong condition, the traits (as absolute things) would be mostly there all the time, though possibly the social ones would be harder to notice as a child because the adult social expectations have still to be applied. As for sensory issues, mine have waxed and waned - nothing till I was about 8, symptoms then abating when I was about 26, returning in my late 50s. But a lot of that could have been down to the effect of boredom and hyperfocus making the sensory issues more or less noticeable.

36, diagnosed aspie. I agree with the others on the shortness of the test, and wishing for more nuanced choices (sometimes, all the time, don't know).

34 & I'm an Aspie