Autism Quiz on Facebook

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Yeah, an ex of mine pointed out to me that a Autism Quotient test is floating about Facebook. A bunch of my NT friends are taking it and all but one have scored higher on the Spectrum than I did. I have a 30 AQ where most of those who have taken it scored at least a point or two higher than me. It's not the score that bothers me so much as the trivializing of mental disorders. Placing autism on the same level of importance as "What Shakespeare Character are you?" or "What office supply are you?" kind of bothers me a bit. I may be oversensitive but am I at least a little justified in being annoyed with this? :/

Online tests are really unreliable. is it a well known quiz or something new?

Yeah everyone is doing it. I scored a 36.

I agree it seems to trivialise mental disorders, in the same way as silly quizzes such as "what mental health disorder are you?" trivialise them and it's a bit annoying when NTs are invited to take it all as one big joke.

I agree. You don't need Facebook to tell you if you have Asperger's or not. Only your doctor can tell you. Don't take too much stock in these online quizzes, or magazine quizzes, for that matter. They're not meant to be taken seriously. It's like reading your horoscope or a fortune in a fortune cookie: It's pure garbage. Besides, people only take quizzes for fun.

I got 41 on this. Typical score for NTs if 17 male or 15 female. AS threshold is ~30. Personally I find this to be unreliable. A friend of mine, who is a nerd, scored ~10. We both thought it was wrong. So it can be fairly accurate, as it was for me, but it seems to have a high error rate.

I would not consider this to be a scientific tool.

It's been really bugging me that all my (NT) friends seem to be doing it, I agree that it trivializes the issue...

As much as I agree with its capacity to trivialize AS, I am struck by how many of the more likely candidates for AS are taking it. For my generation, we never assumed a spectrum, we just thought if we weren't Rainman, we were basically NT. At least folks are acknowledging variety now.

I only saw one friend take it and get a 38 but he's not NT, he apparently has schizoaffective disorder.

Oh, yes... I saw it no my 22 year-old brother's profile. He also suspects, like me, that he has AS, so I wasn't surprised to see that pop up on his profile. He scored 32. I took it and scored 43. We both get in the range. The weird thing was that I've taken this quiz before, exactly the same, and got 43 on that, too! Wow I must have put the same answers as before...
It is a good quiz, I think, but still, some of the questions are pretty odd, or too similar. They make self-diagnosis look really trivial and and AS of little importance, when actually, AS is serious and should be addressed with more than a simple facebook quiz.

A lot of my friends are doing it too. I got 36. Isn't it the same as the quesitonnaire by Baron-Cohen?

Interestingly none of my friends got anything above 17 except one who came out 35 and I'm not surprised. So maybe, as long as people actually answer honestly, it might have some merit.

It *is* the questionaire by Baron-Cohen...

I took it and got 25. According to the Great Wiki, they consider anything below 26 to be enough to effectively rule out an ASD. Really... Some of my friends have taken it, but I don't know their results, save for my aunts (22 or 23, can't remember). Since she's my aunt on my dads side, which is the side that the autism runs in, and my cousins have been touched a little by the Autism fairy...

Even still, it has no place on Facebook. It should only be used by a professional because this questionnaire by itself means nothing if you can't observe the person's behavior. Someone could just pick the answers to affect their score instead of answering honestly. :/

Yeah I noticed some of my friends on Facebook have been taking it recently. Which is funny because just a few months ago I asked them to take it (without them knowing what it was) for my research project. It's available on heaps of websites online so I'm actually surprised it didn't make its way to Facebook earlier.

I think the AQ is good starting point for looking into where you might be on the wider spectrum, but as Baron-Cohen et al. explicitly state, it is NOT diagnostic. I have my own theories now about the validity of this measure after doing some analyses on it, actually the version I saw on FB mentioned the five subscales as well, and how subsequent research has found there to be possibly two, three or four subscales instead. So the AQ still needs some work, I think.

I don't really mind it being "out there" to spread the work about ASD. Not many people are going to read a scientific article or book about it, but people like taking quizzes so I think it is a fairly smart way to get people informed. Though I think it informs people more about the fact that we all have some autistic traits, rather than what it might be like to be diagnosed with ASD.

I consistently score 28 on that test. According to Baron-Cohen, I am Asperger's-free.

Oh well. No other explanation now aside from being a psychopath.