Many autistic people struggle with “multiple choice” and “select the right answer” exam questions. A key reason for this is that the options available can feel - to our brains - like such vague simplifications or awkwardly worded answers that they all feel somewhat incorrect. 1/2
@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic funnily enough the AQ-test is a good example for this.
When I was diagnosed, they commented how I wrote little comments to most of the questions, pointing out the ambiguity or missing options. They later told me that commenting on the test is a very common behavior for autistic ppl.
@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic There are very different kinds of multiple choice tests though. The standard ones with only one correct answer are often like you said. And I always suspect "trick questions" ("it can't be so simple!"). So, I may perform poorly.
There are also tests where zero to all items may be correct. Those are usually harder, you have to know your stuff. But in the end, I find them better and less confusing.
@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic I’m good at them bc I’ve figured out how to read the question superficially and when to turn my brain off (very soon after reading). A masking of interpretation I guess.
I'd believe that, except the APA went in the exact opposite direction with gender dysphoria (declassified it as a disorder but kept in so that trans people could still get needed medical care and accommodations).
Then again, IIR the APA has been a little chaotic internally for the last decade or so; perhaps inconsistencies should not be surprising.
@AutisticAdam
I tend to just call this "snap mode" where I turn off the part of my brain that evaluates and just act. It's far less accurate, but it's the only way I can get through such types of questions. @actuallyautistic
@dr_rug_pull@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic And if we can evaluate & then “snap”, even better. I’m always aware that some questions are ambiguous, poorly worded etc, but have managed to work out the writer’s intent. I’m aware this is much harder for some people.
I know that my friends always felt they had the “inside track” and could feel the right answer, like a vibe coming through the page from the examiner. Well at least the teachers had my back when it came to the formal challenges in exam rooms — they’d announce a word change, or clarification, mid-exam … if people like me caught them out on a sloppy bit of question writing.
@Susan60@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic My maths teacher had a great motto for life — not that he meant it to be, but we never knew if he had reached the point of the day where he DGAF:
“You do what you think’s best”.
He didn’t use this in high-stakes contexts, but it made us back up our authority with documentation. And in hindsight, that was a good skill for so many kinds of real-world decisions.
@ckent@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic I had someone say that the vast majority of parents do the best they can. Their best might not be very good, or even be pretty bad, due to a huge range of factors, but few set out deliberately to be bad parents. (That doesn’t negate the pain a lot of people feel about the parenting they experienced, poor, neglectful, or outright abusive.) While I think we have a duty to try to educate ourselves & deal with our issues to make our “best” better, when our best isn’t very good, we have to be able to forgive ourselves. And best is always better than anything else!
@Susan60@ckent@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic being born and growing up is also inherently traumatic even if you have perfect parents which is impossible. Like let's say you have a completely trauma free childhood by some miracle and then the next day you get your first job at McDonald's...
@wilbr@ckent@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic Part of being a “good” parent is not protecting your children from everything, especially their own mistakes. It’s a difficult job & there’s no single way to be a “good” parent, even within one family, because what works with & for one kid doesn’t work with another. Equipping our kids to deal with trauma as effectively as we can is important, & overprotection doesn’t do that.
@Susan60@wilbr@ckent@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic I think you have to factor in the different timelines of development of ND vs. NT kids though. The support needs to be child appropriate, not some arbitary standard based on general population.
@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic as someone who is trained as a historian and was Dx at age 50; it horrifies me that the capacity for not dealing with absolutes is considered not just a symptom of neurodiversity but a reason to consider autistic people to be of challenged, if not lesser, intellect. how the fuck did we get here?!?
Our best hope at succeeding with exams that have questions like this is to use the process of elimination to eliminate options one-by-one from our pool of potential answers
eliminating them in order of how incorrect sounding they are (most incorrect going first). 2/2
@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic to anyone who's in a place in life where they still have to do this, we recommend also trying to come up with your best guess about the level at which the test's author understands the topic and the kind of answer they're looking for based on that understanding.
a wrong answer at the right level of abstraction is often the "right" answer even when it's factually incorrect
Our work's online training has multichoice questions at the end, and if you don't get 80% you have to repeat. When there are 5 questions it's not so bad, but once there were 10 questions, each with 5 possible answers, and it took me forever to work out which ones I was getting correct. Such a waste of time. I'm not stupid!
@AutisticAdam@actuallyautistic one of my strengths has always been able to discern what they're looking for on multiple choice exams. it was only my SAT scores that saved me from my "underachieving" grades in secondary school.
professionally written exams are generally much better than teacher-written exams, but there were always a few where I knew there was no one right answer. but I figured out the methodology well enough to do ok, & I'm good as a teacher at helping kids make those choices
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