I understand that you were able to do some of the maths thanks to your logic/language skills; However, did your mathematical ineptness
appear to drag down your overall Verbal IQ?
No. When I was assessed with WISC, I scored in the low average range for maths and Digit Span, but my scores for the other components were so high that they couldn't be scaled.
Normal people have an even cognitive profile across all the subtests. People who are excellent at spelling and comprehension should also be good at arithmetic. If they are not, alarm bells ring. If a person does poorly on all the tests in the entire assessment, he is quite simply unintelligent. If a person's profile is full of peaks and troughs, then the psychologist knows that the intelligence is there - it has just been displaced.
People must have some kind of predisposition to exceptional intelligence, yes. But it is perfectly possible for either your verbal intelligence or your performance intelligence to increase dramatically as you grow up, beyond all expectations - if you have a learning difficulty, that is. As I mentioned in an early post, I can't recognise faces. I am face-blind. To compensate for my lack of visual discrimination, perceptual ability, and visual memory (all of which are tested in the performance assessment) I started to describe people mentally when I was very young indeed. As I grew older I realised that I could remember more people if I used sophisticated adjectives - 'he is fat and has mosquito bites' isn't much use as a descriptor. There are lots of people like that. 'He is like an overbaked cherry bun, with juicy red pustules glistening on his doughy skin' is much better. So I accumulated a vast wealth of adjectives and an excellent working knowledge of simile and metaphor because I needed them, in order to prevent myself from accosting a complete stranger in the supermarket and saying, "Can I have some sweets, Mummy?" I use similar imaginative coping techniques for maths, which involve acronyms and storytelling. These survival tactics paid great dividends in the verbal IQ test. Thanks to my learning difficulties, I have built up a neurological infrastructure that would never have existed without them. This is why my overall verbal IQ hasn't been dampened by my comparatively weak maths score - the intelligence has simply been rerouted elsewhere. Were I able to do the cognitive activities that I struggle with, my IQ score would remain the same - because I wouldn't achieve such good scores on reading, spelling, comprehension, and similarities. I would never have developed those abilities, because I would never have needed to compensate for any deficits. Or so the psychologist explained it to me.
In any case, as I have said before, it is the component scores (the scaled scores) that are the most important parts of the whole assessment. You can't work out whether someone is dyspraxic from an average. The assessor is on the lookout for discrepancy of any sort.
as the WS aren't made to discriminate within higher ranges of cognitive ability( it was originally designed for the "mentally deficient" and has a wide range of nuance within the scope of lower ability)
The WISC have undergone extensive revisions since they were first designed. The era when specific learning difficulties were regarded as symptoms of mental deficiency is thankfully dead. According to my psychologist, the principal reasons why there is still a ceiling 'cognitive age' of 17 on the WISC is because there are precious few eight-year-olds with, say, a reading age of higher than seventeen.
That said, I do believe the WAIS to be more accurate.
Perhaps your chronological peers wouldn't touch those books, but what about your cognitive peers? didn't people outside your own entourage notice(ones own family is often biased)? strangers, teacher?
I mean, how often does one behold a seven year old reading Dickens ?
Some teachers did believe me to be gifted. My class teacher in Year 6 wanted me to take a GCSE in English when I was ten years old. He called me into his office and gave me a past paper to do, without telling me what the paper was. He was quite confident that I would pass well. Then he could triumphantly take the paper off to the staff room and insist that I be put in for the exam.
But of course I didn't get the top mark he wanted. The questions were easy enough, but that didn't detract from the fact that I could barely write. (The excellent homework assignments he praised so frequently were always produced on computer.) I had no extra time, the room was full of distractions...there was no conceivable way I could do it. Mr Gould was terribly disappointed. At secondary school, it got worse. On some days my ability was apparent for all to see, on other days it was completely lost from view. This gave rise to sophisticated diagnoses such as 'clever but lazy'.
Subtest ceiling is 19
going above the test or subtest ceilling would, technically require that every single question answered gets full marks, no errors, every question answered right... it's almost a statistical anomaly....
As I mentioned above, I achieved perfect scores on four out of six subtests. I got an average scaled score for the other two. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think you have to get full marks on all the tests to be carried above the overall test ceiling - a lot of it seems to depend on the quality of your response, as well as your actual answer. You get more marks for being articulate. But I would say that the 99.9 percentile is a statistical anomaly, definitely!
and no one ever noticed?
Einstein's teachers never noticed that he was intelligent, either, and he was far cleverer than I'll ever be. They expelled him from school because of his seeming ineptitude. Learning difficulties can camouflage an awful lot. My experiences are by no means rare - a lot of dyspraxic people share them. If you talk to Matt Alden-Farrow, who runs this website and
www.matts-hideout.co.uk, he will tell you that his teachers thought him dim-witted as well. He's now home educated, and working at university level - even though he is four years younger than the average uni student! I personally think he should send his old school a photocopy of his OU results when they arrive. But maybe that's just me being vindictive...
A lot of us have been taken for stupid in the past - some of us still struggle with the stigma. People aren't being very fair to monkey at the moment. (Sorry to make you wade through this whole essay, monkey - we need to find some way of making this forum dyslexia-friendly!)
I hope, though, that your friends are more tolerant now, or at least somewhat understanding, mine aren't at all, it's horribly sad, becuse I know I'm a fundamentally decent person yet to some people I'm some kind of alien.
Things do get better. I have discovered that there are decent people out there, and you will too. But no friend, however loyal, will understand everything. I do have one amazing friend who has never even tried to 'understand' me - she just accepts me for what I am. If Vicky wants to stalk up and down for five hours, waving a pencil in front of her eyes, then that's fine by Sobia. Other friends would try to 'understand' why I need to stim, and then they would try to prevent me from stimming - all with the best of intentions. But as the proverb goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Do you think you have a learning difference, Rita? I can't quite work it out from your messages.