Else if a mystery

I'd say you've done a lot in 2 days. Like learning Greek, don't expect to get far in a day, a week or a month... but study will give rewards.

I went ahead and tried tackling this myself.

This code is a revised version that runs as an action script for each specific drop down box.

Here is the script for the drop down boxes where specific values should be selected:

var a = this.getField("Dropdown0");
var b = this.getField("Reveal");
global.gDrop0 = 0;
if(a.valueAsString == "High Impact/ High Probability"){
global.gDrop0 = 5;
}else if(a.valueAsString == "High impact/ Low probability"){
global.gDrop0 = 4;
}else if(a.valueAsString == "Low impact/ High probability"){
global.gDrop0 = 3;
}else if(a.valueAsString == "Low impact/ Low probability"){
global.gDrop0 = 2;
}else if(a.valueAsString == "Conflict of Interest"){
global.gDrop0 = 1;
}else if(a.valueAsString == "Click cell for drop-down"){
global.gDrop0 = 0;
}

b = b.setItems([global.gDrop0 + global.gDrop1 + global.gDrop2]);

I would be make sure to change the form field names to suit your needs, and for every other drop down box that needs to be calculated, add a new "global.gDrop" value.  So Dropdown0 would have a global.gDrop0, Dropdown1 would have a global.gDrop1, etc.

Of course this code isn't as streamlined as it could be, so any input would be great.

The { } signs (I call them braces but I don't know the right name for them) are needed in a lot of cases to go around things. In your case you shouldn't have removed the one at the start of the line, but added one at the end (or on the next line, that doesn't matter).

If you do that and get rid of the error, but still don't see what you expect, try adding some debugging code at the end like

app.alert ( "Here I am. a is " + a + " but a.event.value is " a.event.value ) ;

Hmm, on reflection, why do you use a.event.value rather than event.value? Is that what your working example used?

What error message do you see in the JavaScript console? If that's all there is, you will certainly get an error message.