The Day I Miscalculated a Client’s Age by Two Years I was sitting across from a new intake, a teenage boy slouched in the chair, arms crossed. His mother filled out the history form while I flipped through the referral packet. We were 40 minutes into a 50-minute session when I glanced down at my…
Let me tell you about the day I invalidated an entire speech evaluation because I miscalculated a child’s age by two months. I was a new clinician, fresh out of grad school, feeling confident about administering the CELF-5. I had the test kit, the protocols, the scoring sheets—everything looked perfect. Except when my supervisor reviewed…
The first time I sat in on a speech-language evaluation for a child in our family, I noticed something that surprised me. Before the therapist even asked the child to say a single word, she spent a few minutes carefully writing down a date calculation on a worksheet. She double-checked it twice. I remember thinking…
Introduction Every Speech-Language Pathologist knows the quiet pressure of IEP meetings, where accurate data must speak louder than raw instinct. Assessing students’ demands far more than clinical skill — it requires true precision. Chronological age anchors every standardized score, yet SLPs often find themselves juggling numbers while calculating under tight evaluation deadlines. What starts as…