How your score was worked out
Forty statements, each answered on a five-point scale. Every answer is worth 0 to 4 points, giving a maximum of 160, which is converted to a figure out of 100.
Seven of the forty are worded in reverse. On those, agreeing counts toward fewer points rather than more. That stops anyone who taps straight down a single column from reaching the top of the scale.
Because of those reverse items the practical range is narrower than it looks. Answering neutrally throughout produces about 50. Agreeing strongly with every statement produces about 82, not 100. Disagreeing with everything produces about 18. Most real results land between 25 and 75.
The bands
| Score | Band | What it indicates |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 20 | Very few traits | Almost none of the forty statements described you. |
| 21 to 35 | Few traits | Some traits, at a level common across the general population. |
| 36 to 52 | Some traits | A noticeable cluster. The area scores matter more than the total here. |
| 53 to 68 | Many traits | A substantial number reported across several areas. |
| 69 to 100 | A high number of traits | Nearly every statement applied to you. |
Why there is no cut-off
If you have read about the AQ or the RAADS-R you may be expecting a threshold. The AQ is usually quoted at 32 out of 50 and the RAADS-R at 65 out of 240. Those numbers exist because each instrument was given to large groups of autistic and non-autistic people, and the point that best separated them was calculated from the data. That process takes years and thousands of participants.
This questionnaire has not been through it. The items are original, written around the trait areas the published research identifies, but no comparison sample sits behind them. Publishing a threshold would mean inventing a number.
What the score does give you is a relative reading. A result of 64 means you reported considerably more of these traits than a result of 31. That comparison is real. A position against a clinical boundary is not.
It is worth knowing that even the published thresholds hold up poorly. When a UK team gave the RAADS-R to adults on a specialist waiting list, 98 per cent cleared the threshold and only 34 per cent were diagnosed. Our RAADS-R guide covers that research in full.
Reading the six areas
The six percentages under your score carry more information than the total, and most people skim past them.
| Area | A high score here suggests |
|---|---|
| Social communication | Reading unspoken intent, group conversation and implicit social rules take conscious effort. |
| Routine and change | Predictability helps you function, and disruption costs you disproportionately. |
| Sensory experience | Sound, light, texture or busy environments affect you more than they affect most people. |
| Focused interests | You pursue interests with unusual depth and notice detail others miss. |
| Masking and recovery | You actively manage how you come across, and it has a recovery cost afterwards. |
| Starting and planning | Beginning and switching between tasks is harder than the tasks themselves. |
Each area is shown as a percentage of its own maximum, so they are directly comparable despite having different numbers of questions behind them.
Common patterns
High masking, moderate social score
The classic signature of someone whose difficulties are invisible from outside. Social comes back middling because conversation has been rehearsed into something workable, while masking comes back high because keeping that up costs a great deal. Reported far more often by women and by adults who reached adulthood undiagnosed, and it is the pattern short questionnaires miss, because most of them do not ask about masking at all.
High sensory and routine, lower social
Sensory sensitivity and a strong need for predictability without much reported social difficulty. Worth taking seriously on its own terms, because sensory distress is disabling whether or not it turns out to be part of something larger. Also the pattern most often mistaken for anxiety.
High across all six
Uncommon in people who are not autistic, and it usually reflects a lifelong pattern rather than a recent change. If this is your result and you have never been assessed, it is worth pursuing.
One area high, the rest low
A single elevated area with nothing else notable is usually not an autism picture. Starting and planning difficulties alone point at least as strongly toward ADHD. Sensory difficulties can stand on their own. Autism is defined by a pattern across areas rather than by one.
What your score cannot tell you
Whether you are autistic. No questionnaire can establish that, including the AQ and the RAADS-R with all their validation behind them.
That you are not autistic. A low score is weak evidence, because masking suppresses exactly the answers a questionnaire relies on. If the result came back lower than you expected and your experience says otherwise, trust the experience.
Autism rather than the things that resemble it. ADHD, social anxiety, complex trauma, long-term burnout and chronic illness all produce elevated scores. Separating them is the largest part of what a real assessment does.
Whether it matters. Diagnostic criteria require that traits cause significant difficulty in daily life. Plenty of people have a high trait count and a life arranged well enough that nothing goes wrong.
What to do next
Nothing is required. Many people take a test like this, find the language useful, and go no further. That is a complete outcome.
If you want to go further, the number is not the useful part. Take the one or two areas that scored highest and write down three or four specific incidents for each. Real events, with what happened and what it cost you. A clinician can work with “I left a job because of an open-plan office”. Nobody can work with a score.
Then find out what you were like as a young child if you can. The criteria require traits present from early development, so a parent’s recollection, an old school report or a sibling’s memory all count for more than a questionnaire does.
Retaking the test
You can retake it whenever you like, with two things worth knowing.
First answers are usually the most accurate, because they are the least considered. Once you understand what a statement is driving at, answering it naively becomes harder.
Scores also move with mood and circumstance. Take this after a difficult week, tired and socially depleted, and you will score higher than you would on a calm Sunday. That variability is a feature of self-report rather than a flaw in the questions. If you retake it after a long gap and get a notably different number, the gap usually tells you about your week.
Questions about the score
Is a score of 50 high?
It is mid-range. Because neutral answers throughout produce roughly 50, a score near that figure often means the statements did not point strongly in either direction for you. Look at the six areas, where the information usually is.
What counts as a high score?
Anything above about 68 means nearly every statement applied to you. On the AQ a score above 32 out of 50 is the commonly quoted threshold, and on the RAADS-R it is 65 out of 240. None of those are comparable with each other, since they are different instruments on different scales.
Can I show this to my doctor?
Bring the examples rather than the number. No clinician treats an online score as evidence, and quite rightly. What they can use is concrete detail from your own life in the areas that scored highest. The thinking you did while answering is the useful output, not the figure.
Do you store my results?
Your answers are held in your own browser for the length of your visit so the score can be calculated and displayed. We do not ask for your name, your email address, or anything else that identifies you, and there is no account to create.