This is absolutely true. The suggestion made by critics is that the experimental group was intentionally loaded with higher functioning children and all the lower functioning children were placed in the control group. In fact, distribution between the experimental and control groups was made solely on the basis of resource availability. If these resources were not available at the time of referral, then the child was assigned to the control group receiving 10 hours or less of behavioral treatment. The children in the second control group were not assigned to this group by Lovaas and his colleagues but were part of a group being treated by other professionals.
Most ethics review boards prefer children to be assigned based on the availability of treatment.
More importantly, the three groups of children were shown by all test measures to be essentially identical prior to treatment, eliminating the argument that the study was rigged for success. The children in the study were not representative of autistic children as a whole. Some critics have suggested that the children in the experimental group had abnormally high IQ scores at intake and were, therefore, high functioning children who would have done well regardless of treatment. This is just not true for several reasons. The average intake IQ scores reported for these programs were essentially identical.