Shankar Vedantam

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.

He decided to apply to the psychology program at Carnegie Mellon University and to focus his application essay on his pet peeve with standardized tests.

He argued that these tests did not reveal the true potential of students.

But Scott didn't give up.

He came up with a new idea.

What if he applied to another department at the same school?