I recently heard a podcast about the new position paper from NAGC which included a discussion about a VECI - Verbal Expanded Crystalized Index.

My DS9 had the following scores on the WISC:

Information 19
Vocabulary 18
Similarities 17
Comprehension 8

I am so confused by the discrepancy. What could this mean? Did he just opt out of this section? The tester noted variable effort and said in the report "It is our opinion that XX is more intelligent than the scores he obtained. This is because across tasks he did not yield liable effort, and he made many inattentions, impulsivity, and distractibility errors across all testing."

He also has ADD and in my opinion (though not officially diagnosed) anxiety.

Thank you for your time.

Welcome!

I would agree that most of his verbal scores are consistent with each other, with the exception of Comprehension. If the examiner believes that that was not representative of his true ability, but more reflective of his attention and effort, then that is probably what it means, as that individual was able to directly observe test behavior. And if fatigue was a factor, it is worth noting that it is also the last subtest administered in nearly the entire cognitive battery (depending on which supplemental subtests were administered) (though Information is also a late subtest, and he did extremely well on that).

If by chance this is a real result (which, as noted, is an open question), some of the possible explanations for a relatively low Comprehension score include lack of real-life experience (sometimes affects very young test-takers whose verbal knowledge comes mainly from the particular genre of books they like), differences in cultural experience, challenges with receptive or expressive language (which is possible, even with very high verbal cognition), and personal weaknesses in social reasoning, despite the presence of intact or strong verbal cognition. (Not an exhaustive list.) BTW, the last item in particular can be accompanied by anxiety, which can be amplified by the gap between overall facility with language, and personal weaknesses with social language.