Reverse Engineering My ADHD Test
After a friend's autism diagnosis, the author decides to get evaluated for ADHD. The psychiatrist administers an online test that tracks spacebar presses, timing, and focus loss. Curious about how it works, the author saves the page scripts and discovers the test's mechanics, including different assets for children and adults. The author then creates a provider account, administers tests to themselves, and compares results from a spam attempt versus a serious attempt, revealing why the psychiatrist suspected cheating.
The charts were so far outside the normal and that as long as I promised I wasn't trying to cheat, she would let me retake the exam.
- delis-thumbs-7e
So they got so bered in ADHD test that they hacked the whole website administering the test. They are truly one of us.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W99n083E0IA&pp=ygUeZnJlYWtzIGd...
- usernametaken29
I spent a decent amount working on ADHD diagnostics and unfortunately it sucks. To my knowledge, to this day, there isn’t a single reliable biomarker that identifies autism spectrum disorders.
It’s usually correlation studies paired with questionnaires which for lack of better words can be described as “incidental” at best. Most z scored tests I know are also developed with small samples, a hundred participants with an outgroup of 20 would already be a LARGE sample. The standard ADHD questionnaire was validated on some 35 people.
There might be some hope in deep learning, particularly in observing eye movement components to deliver reliable biomarkers in the future, but I’m not so confident any time soon.
It’s dreadful and fascinating at the same time that defining and testing for ADS has been so elusive for so long…
- rtpg
I remember finding a test online for "left-right blindness" that had a similar kinda busted vibe. It was literally something where you look at arrows going up/down/left/right and you have to press a thing to match it.
I wish I could find it again and run it across some cohorts, because it was quite fascinating to feel my brain suffer more on the horizontal arrows.
- izzylan
I took a similar ADHD test. It seemed so easy and simple that I always wondered how it was actually supposed to catch me.
Good to know that neurotypical people mostly likely test differently than I did.
- tosti
I would've liked to read the article but I got distracted.
- _fw
I found myself trying to come up with a system that used the position of my hands to “solve” the problem for me.
But then I worried if my system worked, I would be misdiagnosed.
It didn’t work. I was 98th percentile.
Thanks for sharing this!
- a2dam
> At the end, she told me she would review my exam and have the results ready in a few days.
Yeah man I can go ahead and let you know early if you want.
- nullpt_rs
hi! author here, please let me know if you have any questions :-)