Failure seems to be admitted tacitly by director Kilgo when he says, "Some students of course have more aptitude than others, but 95 per cent of the students who come to us could, sooner or later, read more than 2000 words per minute. People who are conscientious enough to stick it out long enough are rare." The guarantee states that the student will learn the technique in eight weeks, not "sooner or later."

At one time, the course was 12 weeks for $150. Now it is eight weeks for $175. Kilgo explains, "We found out that people were only attending eight of those 12 sessions, so we decided it would be more efficient to supply only eight in the first place." The switch must have proved immensely profitable. But a strange phenomenon has been occurring: now students are only attending an average of five of the eight sessions. Missing $65 dollars worth of teaching is not carelessness. The only plausible explanation is that students usually become so discouraged that they give up that infamous faith in ultimate success.

The only way loyalists of the Reading Dynamics enterprises can counter this evidence is by pointing to the small percentage of tuitions refunded. As the official pamphlet says, "The success of Reading Dynamics lies on its ability to teach successfully over 96 per cent of its pupils." This argument is valid only if there is a direct correlation between reading success and tuitions refunded. Unfortunately, there is an amazingly large gap between the two.

Special attention must be paid to the guarantee: "Reading Dynamics will refund the tuition of any student who fails to at least triple his reading index during the course as measured by our standard testing program. This guarantee is valid so long as the student attends each lesson and maintains the requisite home drill at least one hour daily at levels specified by his instructor."

The "reading index" is the product of the reading rate multiplied by the percent score on the comprehension test. Thus if a student reads 300 words per minute and scores 70 per cent on the test he takes during the first session, his index is 210. If on the final test he reads at 1500 words per minute, he need score only 42 per cent on the comprehension score to triple his former reading index to 630. What makes this stipulation even less valid is that before the final test during the eighth lesson, the students are usually instructed to "go full out" even if they have not mastered the technique.

So it often happens that a student will push himself along at 2000 words per minute on the final test, following instructions and confident that his low score on the following comprehension test will prove what he is sure of-that he has not learned to read dynamically. Then a strange thing will happen. He will score well on the comprehension test in spite of understanding little of what he read.

This leads to the basic deception of the Reading Dynamics course. The comprehension test in the first session is much more difficult than the one in the eighth session. The tests are usually on the first and second half of a biography of Albert Einstein. The first questions are almost all fill-ins, and are specefic questions which require detailed recall. The questions on the second test are multiple choice and much less specific.

A Yale graduate student named Richard Gordon is suing the Institute for the price of his tuition. On the final test he refused to read faster than he could understand and consequently finished only about half of the reading in the time allotted. On the comprehension test, he scored 80 per cent on the questions covering the part he read and 70 per cent on the reading he had not done. In a letter to the director of the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Institute, Gordon writes of the second test, "... it was