The impression I've got-pre/post dx

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Is that many going for assessment treat it as though it's a school exam .The intention being to do what's needed to get a pass mark. I was one of those that didn't make copious and detailed notes as to why I should be on the spectrum . For starters my autobiographical memory is quite poor , so a detailed description of things wouldn't have been that easy to provide.

I wasn't totally sure I was on the spectrum,as much as I knew there was more going on than SMI. To be honest a lot of what the ADOS picked up and mentioned were not things that I had made much of a ,or indeed any, mental note of . They were certainly not things I could have said 'I do/behave like x' pre the assessment process. Whether that's also true of others I wouldn't like to say.

Perhaps there is personality? I am highly expressive Type A and am one who made a condensed 50-page submission (I have no social memory either, so it was sensory and emotional memories as well as quotes from past correspondence), but my ASD-like BFF is neither of those and would not do that. Perhaps the "many" you notice who post are skewed towards the expressive or otherwise info-dumping types. I imagine there are many like you too. My ASD-like daughter does not infodump either. She watches and learns and keeps it to herself. She is a Type B.

Are you more Type A or not? Has it changed in your lifetime?

http://www.psych.uncc.edu/pagoolka/TypeA-B-intro.html

Scores range from 35 to 380. Type A is associated with a high score while Type B is associated with a low score. I've always been the same.

They and their doctors want to make sure they don't forget to mention any relevant information. Obviously it's likely things will be overlooked, otherwise they wouldn't be getting assessed as late as adulthood. And some people can't think straight or remember well under pressure.

I couldn't agree more with the OP.

If you're an adult who gets tested late in life to see whether or not you're on the autism scale- there is no reason for anxiety. Its not an school exam, its not a job interview, its not a college entrance interview. I suppose that it doesn't hurt to write things down ahead of time - if its relevant memories from your childhood or whenever -that might seem relevant to your diagnosis. But you don't have to do that. I didn't make any such list, but I had no trouble recalling relevant stuff when I sat in the doctor's office.And I am rather certain that I ended up with the right diagnosis.

I am probably biased because I had been sent to shrinks for decades before anyone ever suggested that I might be an aspie. My parents sent me to be treated for personality stuff that decades later we all realized was aspergers, but it was before the time when the shrinks of America knew what aspergers was. So all of that therapy was basically a waste of time. BUT....it did get me used to the idea of sitting in an office and talking one on one with a therapist. And talking to a therapist is all about just relaxing, and then turning off your intellect, and turning on your emotions, and then talking about what issues that bugged you that week. So when it came time to got to the specialist doctor for my tests for aspergers it was natural for me to just slip back into therapy mode, and I didn't have any anxieties about it. Also it probably helped that the doctor who tested me purposely furnished his office with homey looking furniture so it didn't have a hard gleaming metal clinical look. But that was after I got there. I didn't have anxieties beforehand.

It was quite hard,in my case, to provide much info about the crucial early years . My mother died in 2010. My father was 88 when I mentioned I was going to be assessed . He said he could see no signs, but may have been thinking of autism as it was decades ago.
My sister who is 3 years younger provided what she knew from when I was about 8 or so. My stepdaughter also provided info.

The letter confirming the dx did acknowledge there was very little info about the baby and toddler years, but that my sister's info gave some insight that the problems were lifelong .

Similar to me.

They want you to have folks who knew you lifelong since birth to come in for separate interviews about you, and how your behavior was from the start of your life. Which means that the ideal witnesses are of course your parents. And as with you neither of my parents were available. One died years before, and the other was deep into dementia and would soon die . So I had my sister and my girlfriend as the next best witnesses. Despite being the younger sibling my sister probably did give insights about my childhood-though I don't recall the report specifing who said what. The doctor thanked me after he interviewed the two women. He said that both my sister and my gf were "quite forthcoming!". I guess both of them had a LOT to say about me.
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My score is 226 = more pages! and I have been the same too.

So if we suppose that personality and age are factors...
Clearly there is some function which solves age [yours], score 97 = 0 pages, age [mine], score 226 = 50 pages, where pages increase with Type A score, but peak at a certain age (~38). I played around with it for a little bit, but lost interest.

I agree with you firemonkey. I don’t see any point in approaching it as a “test”. I wouldn’t go into it thinking I need bulletpoints and written examples of behaviours etc, as I believe that it would be fairly obvious from the overall assessment whether or not a person is on the spectrum or not. Funnily enough, when my son was being seen by the CAAMHS team here in England, someone who came along with me, was being observed via a camera in the waiting room, and I was told later that they believed this person was also on the spectrum. That they had no doubts about that.