Shankar Vedantam

At one point, though, when Scott was in high school, a new teacher noticed that he looked bored in the special ed resource room.

Scott felt like he had been trying for years to tell people he had potential.

Suddenly, there was someone else who could see the same thing.

Scott was allowed to leave special ed on a trial basis.

The effect of someone believing in him was transformative.

And it's almost like this one teacher in this one moment, it was almost like a light bulb going off in your head, it sounds like.

One day, he was hanging out with friends after school.

Oh, yeah.

So you graduate high school and you still want to become a psychologist.

You decide that you want to go to Carnegie Mellon.

It's a college in your home state.

It has a strong program in cognitive psychology.

So you take the SAT.

What happens?

I'm wondering, at the point at which you got your SAT scores back, it seems almost as if this is deja vu.

You've taken another test, and the test is supposed to purportedly tell you something about your potential and how smart you are and which track you can go to, which college you can get into.

And very much like what happened when you were 8 and what happened when you were 11,

You were having a test that basically told you, Scott Barry Kaufman, you are not destined for this track.

You are destined for some other track.

To compensate for his weak score, but also to settle scores with standardized testing, Scott came up with a plan.