A pair of rusted training wheels leans against the back wall of my garage, right next to a stack of flattened cardboard boxes and a lawnmower that hasn’t seen a blade of grass in three years. Those wheels represent a specific kind of lie. We tell ourselves they are there to teach balance, but they actually do the opposite.

They teach a child that the world is structurally incapable of letting them fall. They create a false physics where you can lean as far as you want into a turn without consequence. Then, the day the wheels come off, the pavement introduces itself with a violence that feels like a betrayal because the “preparation” was actually a form of insulation.

I’ve been thinking about those training wheels a lot lately, especially after I spent four hours last Tuesday googling a consultant I’d just met at a networking event. He had that specific, polished veneer of someone who sells “success systems” to high-stakes applicants-medical students, nursing candidates, the people we eventually trust with our lives.

I found his LinkedIn, then his old blog, then a YouTube channel from 2019 where he looked significantly more frazzled. What I discovered wasn’t a lack of credentials, but a surplus of condescension. His entire business model was built on the assumption that his clients were terrified children who couldn’t navigate a simple conversation without a twelve-step guide.

The Logic of Over-Scaffolding

This is the dominant logic of the test-prep industry, and it drives me into a quiet, simmering rage. We have built an entire economy around over-scaffolding capable adults. We treat every applicant as a nervous beginner who needs their hand held through every interaction, ignoring the fact that many of these people have already managed complex teams, navigated family crises, or worked forty-hour weeks while finishing a degree.

Take, for example, Sarah. I met her through a mutual friend. Sarah is thirty-one, a former project manager for an environmental non-profit who decided to pivot to medicine. She has spent her career de-escalating conflicts between angry stakeholders and navigating the bureaucratic labyrinths of city government.

She is, by any definition, a competent adult. Yet, when she signed up for a popular prep platform for her situational judgment tests, she was greeted by a “Beginner’s Journey” module. It walked her through how to read a prompt. It gave her multiple-choice questions on “how to be empathetic.” It forced her to watch a seven-minute video explaining that in a professional setting, one should be polite.

“I feel like I’m being taught how to use a fork. I don’t need to know what empathy is. I need to know how to show it when a clock is counting down and a webcam is staring at my forehead.”

– Sarah, Medical School Applicant

The industry defaults to this “imaginary beginner” because it’s profitable. It’s much easier to sell a $3,500 “comprehensive coaching package” that includes forty hours of video lectures on basic human decency than it is to provide a high-fidelity environment where an applicant can actually fail, learn, and iterate.

If you keep the training wheels on, the client feels safe. If they feel safe, they keep paying. But safety is a terrible teacher for a test that is designed to measure how you handle pressure. The Casper test, which is now a standard gatekeeper for healthcare programs, isn’t a test of knowledge.

You can’t “study” for it the way you study organic chemistry. It’s a measure of your reflexive judgment. It asks you to watch a video of a difficult situation-a coworker stealing, a friend asking for an unfair favor-and then gives you a handful of minutes to type or record a video response. It is a high-pressure performance of character.

The Script vs. The Soul

Most prep companies try to “solve” this by giving you a script. They give you “the 5-step framework for ethical dilemmas.” They tell you to always mention “non-judgmental listening.” They turn a human interaction into a Mad Libs exercise. But admissions committees aren’t stupid.

They can smell a canned response from three miles away. When every applicant starts their answer with “It is important to consider all perspectives in this nuanced situation,” the words lose all meaning. The scaffolding has become a cage. I’ve realized that the most “extraordinary” thing we can do for people in these high-stakes moments is to stop assuming they are helpless.

It’s the difference between reading a book about the ocean and being dropped in the surf. If you want to get better at a situational judgment test, you don’t need another lecture on ethics. You need to sit in the chair, look at the lens, and feel the heat of the timer.

You need to see a scenario that makes you uncomfortable and find your own voice-not a coach’s voice-to navigate it. You need to realize that your first three attempts will probably be shaky. You might stumble over your words. Your typing might be frantic. That’s the point. That’s where the actual learning happens.

Hayden L.-A., a crossword puzzle constructor I know, once told me something that stuck: “The mistake isn’t making the clue hard, it’s assuming the solver doesn’t want to work for the answer.”

We have applied the opposite logic to test prep. We assume the “solver” (the applicant) is so fragile that we have to make the preparation so easy, so guided, and so repetitive that they never actually have to think. We give them the answer key before they’ve even understood the question. But when they get to the actual exam, there is no guide. There is just the prompt and the silence of the room.

The Arrogance of Designing for a “Type”

If you are an applicant-whether you’re twenty-one or forty-one-you have to resist the urge to buy into the “scared novice” archetype. It is a marketing trick designed to make you feel like you are missing a secret ingredient that only a $4,000 package can provide.

There is a specific kind of arrogance in designing products for a “type” rather than a person. When we design for the type, we ignore the reality of the individual. We ignore the nurse who has already saved lives but is being told how to “prioritize” in a mock scenario. We ignore the teacher who has managed thirty chaotic teenagers but is being lectured on “de-escalation techniques.”

The most effective tools aren’t the ones that explain the world to you. They are the ones that let you interact with the world and show you where you slipped. Feedback is the only thing that actually moves the needle. Not “great job” or “try harder,” but objective, data-driven feedback that says, “In this specific scenario, you failed to address the autonomy of the other person, and that’s why you’re in the second quartile.”

The Sound of Judgment Sharpening

That kind of feedback hurts a little. It’s supposed to. It’s the feeling of the pavement when the training wheels are gone. But that hurt is the sound of your judgment actually getting sharper. It’s the sound of you becoming a better candidate, not just a better test-taker.

I think about that consultant I googled. He’s still out there, selling his “Beginner’s Mastery” courses, probably telling someone right now that they need to memorize a specific list of transition words to use in their video responses. He is building a world of polished, identical robots.

I’d rather live in a world of slightly messy, deeply authentic humans who know who they are because they’ve done the work. I’d rather be the person who dives straight into the practice, mistakes and all, than the person who spends three months studying the theory of how to stand up.

In the end, the exam doesn’t want to know how well you can follow a manual. It wants to know what you do when the manual isn’t there. It wants to see the person who has been in the arena, even if that arena was just a high-fidelity simulator in their bedroom. Stop letting companies treat you like a beginner. You have a life’s worth of judgment already sitting in your gut. You just need to practice getting it out.