Asperger Syndrome versus the ACT

My 17 year old son has Asperger syndrome.

I had a discussion with him this weekend over his performance on the ACT test that he took just a few weeks ago. We still do not have the results back yet but I was interested to see what his impression was. He was quite adamant about the test being "opinionated." This was a word I would never have associated with a test that strives to be gender, race and socioeconomically neutral.

Despite all the best efforts of these high-level test designing educators, their test had achieved a resounding "thud" with my son. He was not impressed.

In the discussion I discovered what it was that had my son so decidedly put-off by the ACT. In vast swaths of the test, there are multiple choice questions where the person taking the test must provide the best possible answer of the choices provided.

This sort of question and answer does not fly with my son because he does not process information in that way--he is extremely literal. My son could simply not understand why the testers did not include the right answer in so many of these multiple choice questions. As far as he was concerned, if he could think of a better answer for the question, even one that was not provided, he was being forced to choose from four or five answers that were equally wrong. How he did on those questions is anyone's guess.

These are the types of unanticipated encounters that a parent must face when gently lifting a child with Asperger syndrome into adulthood. Had I been able to anticipate this little speed bump in the road, perhaps we could have navigated around it together.