From the way the neuropsych explained it, there is a flaw in the test design that sometimes causes kids to score abnormally low, but some kids with a low score "deserve" it, too. It's very hard to tease apart which it is. She gave us an example from the test - there are 4 pictures, and they are supposed to pick the one that "doesn't fit." I won't tell you about the specific example because it's part of a still-current test, but DS5 came up with a perfectly acceptable reason for picking the wrong one - no points. The neuropsych's report said that she thought that that test was too low, because it was significantly discrepant with the other two "Performance" subtests and because he was able to give acceptable-sounding reasons for his choices even when they didn't match the rubric. On the other hand, he just qualified for an IEP and special ed in part because of a problem with his verbal skills (he tanked paragraph comprehension even though he did very well on sentence comprehension and antonyms).
For what it's worth, 22B, our neuropsych thinks that Picture Concepts is somewhat flawed. I'm not sure if it's still there on the WISC-V or not - does anyone know?
Thanks for the explanation. (Picture Concepts was on WISC-
IV when DS took it a year ago.) I'm skeptical about the value of these some of tests too. Sometimes some of our kids just think differently and it can hurt their scores. Maybe my kid "deserved" a couple of low scores for "inability to think inside the box when required".
