“The first principal is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman
Near the beginning of my time as an SAT tutor I had a client, who we will call “Steve.” When I first met Steve he seemed like a nice kid, perhaps a bit reluctant to work hard to improve his score, but amiable enough. My first few visits with each student began the same way- going through the basic strategies before tailoring the rest our time to the specific students needs. During this introductory period I gained a good idea of where I thought a student would score when we moved on to taking practice tests.
Steve was pretty good- I thought he would be scoring in the high 500s and low 600s for each of the sections when I told him to do his first practice test. So, when he came back with scores in the high 600s/low 700s, I was incredibly impressed, and a little surprised. We went through the questions (I always went over difficult ones they got right, as well as the ones they got wrong), and it quickly became clear he didn’t really have the level of understanding necessary to get that many right. For example, he would miraculously guess with great accuracy on multiple math questions without knowing the proper concepts. I noticed that he narrowed down the answers to two or three frequently, but never had a clear reason why he picked the eventual “right” answer.
It is important to note that I gave my students books that contain both practice tests and the answers, and encouraged them to go over the tests themselves. The process helps crystalize the material before I come, as well as understand the way the tests are structured and graded. Over a long period of suspicion, I came to realize that Steve was clearly misleading me about his scores. Practice tests came and went and his comprehension never matched his scores. I believe that he was leaving two or three answers open, and “choosing” the right answer after looking at the answer key.
So, I faced a dilemna. Should I tell his parents he was misleading us? I had repeatedly made clear to him that he should treat the practice tests just like a real test, not look at the answers until he was done, etc… But, I knew he wasn’t doing that. Worse yet, his parents knew about his practice test scores, and came to expect he would achieve around that on the real test. I was only 17 and hadn’t been tutoring for that long, and I really liked his parents. I just couldn’t tell them what was going on (plus, did I really know?). (Big mistake #1).
Instead, I decided that I could prevent him from doing this by making him take a practice test under test conditions- i.e with me sitting in the same room. I had a few other students preparing for the same test date, and scheduled the practice test for the week before (Big mistake #2). Steve came in, took the test, and got in the mid 600s on all three sections. I was pretty impressed, it was about a 50 point improvement on each section from his where I thought his comprehension was at the beginning. But, it was about 70 points below what he had been getting on his personally rigged tests of late. This pretty much confirmed my suspicions.
He was demoralized. Shocked that he had gotten scores that low. The look on his face when he realized how he was really doing has stuck in my mind for years since. He went on to take the real test, and once again got scores in that range. His parents promptly fired me. They were justified, he had done way worse than his practice tests, right? If only I had communicated my suspicions better throughout. It wasn’t until months later that I realized why he looked so sad. I think it was only then that he truly realized the discrepancy between his real ability, and his fake ability while holding the answer key. The whole time he had not only been fooling me, he had been fooling himself.
This was a huge eye-opener for me, the first client who ever fired me. First time I really mishandled a situation. And my first real lesson running my own business.