IQ and Autism.

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I've been told I have Autism and not Asperger's by my neurologist and psychiatrist. However I have a very high IQ. Does this make sense? Or am I just being confused? I thought Classic Autism apparently has an IQ cut-off of 70.

NB: I live in the UK which is not under the DSM-V but under ICD-10 which still has Asperger's Syndrome and Autism as separate diagnoses.

I think it depends. I have an IQ that varies between 70 and 85, but I'm still considered as having classic autism on a more high-functioning end I guess.

As far aI know it's rather a question of whether you had a speech delay or not to determine whether you are considered to have Asperger's or classic autism.
IQ is to determine whether you are high- or low-functioning.
Temple Grandin for example has classic autism, but is considered high-functioning.
Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay instead has a very high IQ but is considered low-functioning.

You're confusing two things. The diagnosis 'autistic disorder' (also called 'classic autism') includes individuals along a range of IQs; one could have the designation 'lower functioning autism', which is indeed used to denote people with an IQ below 70. Above 70, one would be considered as having 'high functioning autism'. It is mostly a colloquial label; a shorthand to apply functioning levels along a neat demarcation line. One could question its validity when one looks at people with the diagnosis autistic disorder on a case-to-case basis; the problems faced by 2 autistics with respective IQs of 60 and 80 might be more similar than those faced by an autistic with an IQ of 130. Furthermore, a significant number of autistics whose intelligence has been determined at below 70, are able to communicate their thoughts eloquently through less conventional means, such as TTS systems and online communication, which casts further doubt on the way intelligence is traditionally measured.

'Asperger syndrome' is, in the DSM up until it's 4th edition and still in other diagnostic manuals, a pervasive development disorder that is strongly associated with autism, but differs from it mainly due to a lack of a significant speech delay during childhood. As its symptoms are very similar to those with the diagnosis 'autistic disorder' with average to above-average IQs, it has been thought by many to be essentially the same disorder as high functioning autism.

TL;DR:
-autistic disorder is classic autism
-classic autism is not necessarily low functioning autism
-high functioning autism and Asperger syndrome share many symptomatic similarities

If you used to think you might have Asperger syndrome, but the neurologist/psychiatrist has diagnosed you with autistic disorder, it's not all that strange. You can contact your psychiatrist to ask them why they came to the diagnosis of autistic disorder. I was diagnosed with autistic disorder, and I have experienced no significant impairment in my speech development; however other factors determined the diagnosis- I have neglected to ask the psychiatrist which factors, but it's no longer of importance.

EDIT: in other words, what Eloa said. And much more concisely than I did, I should add.

That is very helpful, the descriptions. Thank you.

I need support workers on a regular basis and I don't function as well (I know that functioning "well" is a bit of a misnomer though) as people I know who have Asperger's.

Well I have actually just started the process of the autism evaluation, and I just have to wait a month or so before I do the first part, which is the IQ test. I asked the psychologist what the purpose of it was, and she basically said that normally in an evaluation of someone suspected to have classic autism, it was to see where their intelligence actually lies, just to get a better idea of how to help them etc. For me, she said it would be a similar thing, except when I told her how I did on my ACT (nearly perfect) she said it would be more just to see how high I get, which I am very curious to see; I don't feel I have been given a truly accurate test.

So I don't really know if the IQ has any official requirement for what diagnosis a person gets, but I don't even think it affects whether they are high-functioning or not. It is probably more common for higher IQ's to be associated with the higher-functioning individuals, but I see no reason that someone lower on the spectrum couldn't have a very high IQ. The ability to function isn't a direct result of IQ; it is more just the ability to cope and generally live independently. If functioning was a result of IQ I probably would have not learned about autism, as I would have had no reason to seek out help. I am extremely intelligent, but off on my own I had a very hard time, and I wasn't even fully independent; at university I was living in a shared dorm and had a meal plan. I became very overwhelmed, and in the end I stayed in my dorm and didn't attend my classes or social events. Yet I took and passed almost all of my finals, because I could learn the information from just reading the textbook, or even deriving the equations and information I needed from known knowledge during the test. I am sure I have a very high IQ, and I am high-functioning enough that the DSM-IV would say I have Asperger's.

Well... to be honest, I don't know if my speech was delayed, and that seems to be the biggest thing in differentiating between the two, so I could be with classic autism after all. According to my mother, it was delayed, which actually caused my grandma to wonder if it was autism at one point; but I'm not sure if I failed to meet many speech milestones, or if it was more that I just couldn't communicate with speech, despite having the ability to speak. That would explain why my mom disagreed with my grandma. When I ask her about it she said I never talked. She said I started being able to speak in sentences at 3, so that is normal, but that I didn't ever do it hardly, and I am wondering if she just means I could repeat the sentences I heard.

@MehruneMath: The Stanford-Binet Scale measure the IQ up to 141. I'm sure the score of 197 is a raw score which is translated as an IQ of 131.