That questionnaire really needs a "what do you mean" or "question unclear" option.

also the literal question was so hard for me to answer because of the "always" qualifier as even if there is one time that someone is not literal then it would be completely false that they are "always literal". to make it harder "never true" being one of the answers just adds another qualifier that is a struggle to answer

having questions about the questions is very relatable haha.

I must have really annoyed the person assessing me back then. they told me I could write notes, so I gave them pages worth explaining every single answer, and all the possible ways I could have interpreted each one and which interpretation I used when giving my answer.

As a child, if my daily routine was interrupted by me not having to go to school, I would have been overjoyed. So very context-dependent!

i told my coworker i was autistic and she asked if  i take everything literally. i told her "no, you're thinking of kleptomaniacs"

“Forced to play by other people’s rules” a very good description.  Feeling an imposed one-sided set of assumptions on their part suddenly imposed on you without warning with no way out of it.

"Ever heard of black and white thinking?" -- I do love how autistic traits as described by neurotypicals include "rigid thinking", and a lot of the time I actually find neurotypical thinking rigid!
The "literal thinking" was one part of the criteria that kept me from identifying as autistic for a very long time, because I... took it too literally. I teach languages and literature, I am great at understanding idioms, metaphors, analogies etc., so I didn't see how I could be seen as too literal.
But thanks to content like yours, I realized that I've always struggled with weirdly phrased instructions and requests where there are implied expectations, and with small talk that conveys a different meaning than the words being said. You're right about "incorrectly imprecise"!

The idiom questions don't make sense if you are not a native english speaker. Where I'm from we use a lot of idioms and nearly everyone learns english, so you just get a list of idioms, what they mean, and then the idioms in english. So you don't have to guess their meaning from context, you just get a list to memorize.

I am also late diagnosed. I took this quiz as a starting place. It did not screen me as being autistic. It took years for me to find out that highly masking autistic women often do not screen for autism on these online quizzes.  I won't go into the rabbit hole that led me to becoming convinced I am autistic, but I became convinced I am by researching autism in women, watching vids put out by autistic people. I contacted an organization that helps people with developmental conditions and they selected a neuropsychiatrist that specializes in identifying missed autistic adults.  Highly masking women often get missed even when we go in for evaluation. I feel lucky that I got the doctor that screened me because she was well educated in spotting women with autism.

I just wanted to point out that you can be almost normal socially, I can hold conversations, I enjoy small talk, I would be described as a social leader, I have been known as the person that throws parties, etc. I love people. But the older I get the harder it has been for me to be social, the more exhausting it is for me to perform social tasks, the more avoidant I become of public places. I am writing this comment because other women might see this vid and screen themselves out based on these quizzes. They weren't designed to screen us. They were designed to miss us. Autistic women are often socially motivated, able to have long term friendships. I DO have some forms of social dysfunction, but they would not be what you'd expect. I am too empathetic at times. But my biggest social deficit is because there is one emotion I do not feel that others do. I have no capacity for jealousy. I know what it is to feel envy, but I jealousy is a foreign emotion. I do not feel angry at people because I envy them. I never knew that jealousy is a huge motivator for many people. This one little blind spot caused by autistic alexithymia has been a huge problem for me. I feel most emotions in a neurotypical way, I have both cognitive and emotional empathy for every other emotion but that one. And because I don't feel it i don't see it in others, until it is too late. And that wouldn't normally be a problem except I am a perfectionist that a lot of people have been jealous of.  I just wanted to say, if you are a woman, and you sometimes don't understand why someone is mad at you, or what you did to make someone dislike you, you might be autistic.

I did take this test a while back, and I won't ever again. I remember having so much difficulty just understanding each question. This test literally took me over an hour because I was second-guessing everything 😭 I also find besides the fact it's questions are very outdated in some ways and seem to go along with the usual "autism stereotypes", it also completely dismisses and takes out of consideration people who have adhd and autism (which we know is very common).

5:50 I inherited my mom's language skills, was talking before 12 months, and have had a tendency to absolutely inhale any reading material set before me since I learned to read. I can process idiomatic language with no problem. My autistic over-literalness tends to consist of not sufficiently considering the possibility that someone may be lying, and in an extraordinarily dry sense of humor that involves a lot of responding to other people's jokes with an elaboration in the idea delivered completely deadpan.

DUDE! Thank you for that comment on the crowds. I often think "I am fine speaking to crowds/teaching/etc." But I am completely bumbling and erratic in a "group" where people are conversing.

My trouble with that sort of test, is neither the questions nor the answers are ever quite nuanced enough.

And they say "well, just pick the closest"

Which is stressful AF, because choosing between pointedly inaccurate answers, which will lead to poor assumptions, which causes me no End of people not getting what I'm pointing at, which is the Bane of my fucking existence, sucks.

I'm already translating odd, far reaching, deeply interconnected emotional sense images into "mostly, but not really, close enough language", but now I'm having to suss out the worldview of whoever decided on That loaded question, and these canned answers which are not My answer.  

My entire existence and interface with the world and everything, is deeply complicated context dependent.

sigh

I always feel like half of the questions in these tests are very unclear and need more explanation. Like the one about other people being offended by what I say. I mean, how on earth would I know if someone is offended by what I say. Unless they actually tell you. But I'm sure lots of people wouldn't say anything and just keep it to themselves. Some of the questions rely on others opinions and thoughts which you wouldn't know.

5:16 The question about ‘putting myself in other people’s shoes’ launched a really interesting reflection in me:
- No one’s shoes are so big that I could put my whole self in them
- No one’s shoes are so small that I can’t put part of myself into them
- Obviously this is true literally but it’s also true of me metaphorically
- When I put part of myself in other people’s shoes it’s normally because I’m putting my hand in my kids’ shoes to look for stones etc
- So even when part of me is in another’s shoes it’s not the equivalent part of my body, but rather my hand groping around to get a sense of their experience
- And that’s how I generally empathise with others: I reconstruct through intellectually fumbling around to gauge the basic dimensions of someone else’s experience.

I never realised that metaphor could have so much in it!

"Question 17: Others consider me odd or different. Um, yep, moving on" 😂😂😂

The flirting thing is funny because I distinctly remember reading a wikihow article or two on how to flirt back when I was a late teenager, and one of signs mentioned was that mirroring body language shows interest. I was later talking to a very cute person at a college party, feeling warm and buzzy from alcohol and the attention, when I suddenly noticed our body positioning was mirroring each other's, and it was a lightbulb moment of "oh! We're flirting! Cool!" Nothing came of it obviously because he had a girlfriend, but it was the first time I realized I was flirting intentionally and not accidentally.

Social skills don't come naturally to everybody but it's possible to learn and practice any skill, talent just gives you a head start.

I identified myself to be AuDHD this year. As a highly masking woman with a special interest in languages, psychology, politics and social studies, I find it hard to answer questionnaires, because I often 1)know several answers, which sometimes can be opposite and lead to both yes and no, 2)have a version of myself for outside world (people usually read it as an excitement, even when it’s not) and a version for home->1st has tendency to be very open and engage in everything, 2nd is a complete loner spending most time at home with my computer, 3)because of p.2 I feel a need to “mask” into an autistic self and play along with a questionnaire using a scheme: 1)try to understand which autistic quality the question is referred to, 2)recall my own presentation of that quality, because it often is masked or differs from the example given, 3)answer rather about the quality, than to the exact question. With all of this taken into account I usually score in an “autistic range”, but pretty close to an “allistic” border. I assume that if I answered such a questionnaire ~5 years ago, I would not score autistic. At the same time, as I’m getting further in the process of unmasking, I assume over time I may score “more autistic”.
I also think one of the big difficulties for me is recognizing my autistic traits, because for my whole life I’ve considered them to be standard and even never had a thought that other people are SO different from myself.
E.g. I still have no idea on how to distinguish people by their qualities (what does it mean to have “high nose”, “moon-shaped face” or to be “smart”, “responsible”, “coward” etc. in real life), how it’s possible to make diminishing jokes about animals/people or how someone can become successful just for their social skill without actual knowledge of the topic. And many people I’ve seen are able to do all of these naturally.

Thanks for this Mike. Knowing the true prevalence of autism is the key to supporting it and us.  As a 60 year old with a medical diagnosis, I'm 1:18,000 supposedly. It's a shocking figure that reflects massive underdiagnosis - not an increase in actual prevalence. We need to encourage everyone to get screened - especially older adults like me. Until childhood rates match geriatric rates, there will be a lost autistic cohort. As difficult and tragic as my life has been, my diagnosis gave it meaning.

That changed everything. It's been a challenging journey, but I'm finding my footing, and living my best possible life.

My Autism is a blessing.

I took the RAADS-R cause a couple of my friends were taking on a school trip. It took me a few hours because i had so many questions (and we were running around doing things).
Long story short, i scored 193 (15, 87, 51, 40 for each category in order) and started looking into Autism. Tens of hours of research, writing a 12 page research paper about autistic communication for fun (not including the cover page or citations), and subscribing to a few late diagnosed autistic youtubers later: I’m pretty sure I’m autistic and I feel comforted that who I am and why I am certain ways has an explantation and that I’m not just ‘weird’.