IQ Test?

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For my of my assessment I will be taking an IQ test. Is that to rule out MR? Obviously I can't be low functioning since I scheduled the assessment, so is it just standard practice to include one anyway? For those of you who have been diagnosed, did you have to take an IQ test?

No IQ test during my diagnosis. I was diagnosed as an adult, and docs seem to have differing ideas about IQ testing for adult Aspies. I was asked if I'd had my IQ tested as a child, and told them the results of a test I had around age nine. Maybe that was enough.

I haven't taken one for an AS diagnosis (yet) but the psychologist said that Aspies tend to have much more pronounced peaks and troughs in the different areas of IQ tests than NTs - they tend to be very good at some areas and much worse in others (e.g. I'm much better with numbers than with logic). Also, Aspies tend to have average or above average IQs.

Well, yes, partly it's to rule out MR. (Though someone in the mild range would be quite capable of scheduling an assessment, if it came to that.) It makes a difference in your specific diagnosis.

The more important reason is to try to spot weaknesses in your cognitive profile. For example, if you tend to score at a certain percentile for most things, and then randomly dip fifty points lower for math, it's a pretty good guess you've got problems doing math--maybe a learning disability in that area. Or, maybe you end up with a huge verbal>performance gap; that's a dead giveaway that they should look at something like NVLD even if your overall IQ is just fine. With me, for example, they saw that I was dead-on horrible at arranging pictures into stories when they had social content, which was a red flag for AS.

It's not really the overall IQ that's all that important; not with an autistic cognitive style. It's just that we tend to have a lot of strong points and weak points and not all that much in the middle--scattered subscores versus the typical NT clustered scores. You want to request your full report, not just the number but how you did on the specific tasks, and ask what that means about your strengths and weaknesses.