Are there any Aspies with Below Average IQ?

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Hi All-

I was just reading through the thread about IQ's and personality traits. It seems as almost everyone of the Aspies posted Above Average or Gifted Intelligence.

I am very curious about this, (and maybe it is too soon to tell), but my son who is 5 had his IQ tested at school. His score was below average. I am okay if his intelligence is below average, but he just seems to exhibit so many Aspie characteristics, it just doesn't seem to mesh. I just thought I would ask for opinions. Here are the things that make him seem like an Aspie:

Very social with adults/little interest in his peers.
Obsessed with car makes and models, churches, and now bathrooms.
He has poor gross and fine motor skills (although they are improving)
He had words on time, and now speaks in full sentences---most of these make sense, but he does make up words and likes to speak in gibberish at times. he did a lot of echolalia which has subsided for the most part.
Flaps his hands and shakes his head back and forth.
Doesn't pick up on social cues.(for example he will get too close to someone's face to talk to them (even if the person is a stranger)
Wants to touch everything and likes to smell people.

The things that make him not seem like an Aspie:

He is pretty flexible/doesn't seem to have to have set routines.
Enjoys going new places and seeing new people
Doesn't lecture people on special interests
Doesn't really have severe meltdowns.

His diagnosis is PDD-NOS/possible Aspergers. I know autism is a spectrum and there are varying degrees, I guess I am just trying to better understand my son. While he doesn't seem to be exhibiting genius behaviors, I certainly don't feel that his intelligence is below average.

Officially a person can't be diagnosed with AS if their IQ is below 70, but in practice people are diagnosed with it sometimes even then. It's not absolutely set in stone.

My current IQ is in the borderline range even though my old ones were higher. (I'm diagnosed with autism though.) I know people in my position and also ones whose IQ got higher with time rather than lower. It all depends on the person and IQ is just a number, doesn't tell you much about anyone let alone a neuro-atypical person.

Soon enough it's going to be a moot point (in countries that use the DSM) anyway because AS and PDDNOS are going to be merged with autism in the DSM. (PDDNOS is what someone would currently get if they met the AS criteria but not the autism one, and yet had an IQ too low for the AS one.)

Not every Aspie exhibits every characteristic.

And "genius-level intelligence" is not in the diagnostic criteria. I'm officially diagnosed and I'm dumber than a box of rocks.

--XFG

It is not much clear what "Below average IQ" really means, specially because it is not also much clear what is supposed to be "average IQ" - 100? 85-115? 70-130?

What the DSM says is "There is no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or in the development of age-appropriate self help skills, adaptive behavior (other than in social interaction) and curiosity about the environment in childhood." and "In contrast to Autistic Disorder, Mental Retardation is not usually observed in Asperger's Disorder, although occasional cases in which Mild Mental Retardation is present have been noted (e.g.,when the Mental Retardation becomes apparent only in the school years, with no apparent cognitive or language delay in the first years of life)."

I used to score in the mildly ret*d range when I was little. I don't know if it was in the 70's or not because back then 80 or below was considered mentally ret*d and then in 1992, they lowered it to 70. Now 71-84 is just borderline.

Yep. The "all Aspies are misunderstood geniuses" stereotype isn't the worst thing people could think about us, but it still isn't true. Between 2 years running an Aspie social club and my time spent here, I can pretty comfortably state that Aspies run the gamut in intelligence and opinion, not to mention personality and levels of impairment.

I've first tested, with a score of 87.

You can't have a ret*d person with Asperger's. They may have one in the 80s or 90s, sure, but they can't qualify for a diagnosis of mental retardation. Plus, I've heard "Intelligence" Quotient tests aren't really valid ways of testing the intelligence of a lot of autistic people, due to the different ways autistic people think and perceive information.

Yes, DogDay, I do have my suspicions that my son just does not always want to do what people are asking him to do. The school did agree that he seems to exhibit ADHD traits, so maybe he just wasn't paying attention to what they were asking. My son is a very interesting little guy. I also believe he has dyspraxia which may interfere with him being able to perform some of the tasks.

My son is definitely not mentally ret*d, but he scored a 65 on the test. He is speaking in full sentences, he is asking us questions, he knows all of his letters, numbers, shapes, and colors. He seems to be progressing slowly but surely. He definitely exhibits Aspergers traits, so I am just not sure that he wanted to do the test. I am pretty sure he is not mentally ret*d, although his score seems to indicate this.

They did say that he seems to do fine with learning information that is static (like letters and numbers) But, that he will always have trouble with problem solving.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I think the Asperger's diagnosis needs to go bye-bye, and fast. What do you do when somebody scores a 69 on the IQ test and has every single characteristic of a classic case of Asperger's? ...PDD-NOS. Lovely, folks. Really useful diagnostic criteria there.

There are two things you might call an "average IQ": 100, which is the smack-dab center of the normal distribution, and the range of 70-130, which is two standard deviations away from normal, or the "normal range", within which a person can be considered to have an IQ which isn't particularly unusual. If you're talking about "below 100", then half the people in the world are in that category, and it really only means the person's in the lower half as far as IQs go.

If you're talking below 70, then yeah, you're not supposed to get an Asperger's diagnosis, but like I said, I don't like that criterion at all because what do you do with the people whose cases tick every check box but the "no developmental delay"? They're every bit as Aspie as the people who scored better on the IQ test. Below 70 is what you call "mental retardation" (though only if there are also problems with everyday daily-life type skills--if there aren't, you can't diagnose mental retardation), and in general you expect slower development, but when autism's in the picture all bets are off because we've got just plain weird development in general.

An IQ of 65 is at the top end of the "mild MR" range. If you had that score and you weren't autistic, the prognosis would be something like, "Will finish vocational high school program; will live independently; will probably support self with semi-skilled or unskilled work;" but with autism... who knows? You just can't tell at five, especially if there's a communication issue. Think about it: How do you know how to do the test? That's right--the tester gives you instructions. And what is that? Communication. See the difficulty? That's why testing autistics is ridiculously hard and notoriously inaccurate.

And may I note that IQ test scores don't even say much about autistic intelligence. Anbuend noted how much her scores have changed over her lifetime; I know of others whose IQ scores started out low and got higher, or have been all over the board from MR to genius; and a lot of us can tell you how our scores are pretty much invalid for us, too. Either you get a low score because some overall weakness was creating problems that didn't let you do the test; or you get a high one that doesn't mean much because you're being held back by something that wasn't on the test; or you get a completely meaningless one because your subtests have such a wide scatter that your strengths and weaknesses have nothing to do with your full-scale IQ.

If I were you, OP, I'd ignore the IQ test, look at the subscales for what information you can get about your kid's specific strengths and weaknesses, and generally approach it as an individual person who isn't defined by his IQ or by anything else. You just can't define a person's ability to learn, let alone an autistic person's, but a simple number.

You muh-muh-muh make me happy...











Nevah go full-on.

1. I think people that are more likely to use Wrongplanet have higher IQ's.
2. People with higher IQ's are more likely to post them.
3. People lie.