Justifiably Slow

I always knew that I was slow. At school, if I had to read a book along with another student, they would be turning the page before I could get through the second sentence. It would also take me twice as long as other students to finish homework at night, and I was always the last one to finish a test. A testament to my poor mental math ability, I was fired from my cashier job because I couldn’t manage to count money fast enough. Likewise, during my flute lessons, I could only play a piece at half-pace because I just couldn’t read the notes that fast.

However, despite being slower, I never felt less smart than my peers. This idea baffled me for years until things finally became clearer the summer before my senior year of high school. That summer, as I started taking the SAT, my slowness became ever more apparent — and troubling. When it came to homework, I could always get away with reading slowly by spending more time on the assignment. But with the SAT’s time limits, I was at a total loss. As I took more and more self-scored practice tests, I came to realize that I was answering questions correctly, but just not getting through them fast enough. I would be left with a 98th percentile score on the verbal section, and 15th percentile score on the reading section.

I had heard from a friend about processing speed testing, and how it could get students extra time on tests. This seemed like a no-brainer: time was what I needed. But after some research, I found out that the testing cost 1,800$. How could I make my parents pay for this? Was it worth it? What if I didn’t have a processing speed deficit and wasted all of this money? And if I did have one, was this simply the cost of having a disability?

I decided to take my chances and to take the test. After all, whatever was causing my slower speed in school was seriously hindering my academic performance, and I needed to know where to make the attribution for my lower grades. Was I really less smart than my peers, or was I just slower to function?

The test lasted 16 hours over 2 separate sessions. The psychiatrist administered a battery of 12 psychological tests including tests of intelligence (WAIS-IV), memory (Wechler Memory Scale IV), attention (Conner’s Adult ADHD Rating Scales), achievement (Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement III, and reading (Nelson-Denny).

When I got my results, my suspicion was confirmed: I had scored in the 5th percentile of the WAIS-IV Working Memory scale, yet scored in the 95th percentile in verbal comprehension. This discrepancy, seen in less than 1% of the normative sample, meant that my lower performance on timed tests was due to poor working memory, and not to lesser intelligence. And knowing that was more important than any extra testing time I received based on this assessment.