In this article, the authors describe a mechanism they developed that assesses the congruence between their students' self-perceptions and the impressions they give to others. They wanted the students to view themselves, but they also wanted them to gain perspective on how others perceive their symbolic displays of affect. Preliminary results indicated that students who overestimated their own appearance of interest relative to the perceptions of others (negative incongruence group) had lower grade point averages, had been more likely to drop/retake courses, and were more likely to state the need to fake interest in the details of friends' lives than were students who had congruence or positive congruence (underestimation of how interested they appeared). Students with negative incongruence were also more likely than others to report having had misunderstandings with coworkers. Another concept worthy of future attention is what the authors call "ambiguous projection of the student role." They discovered that some students presented wide variability (larger standard deviation) in the perceptions of others; in other words, people have a hard time "reading" these individuals' behavioral clues in a consistent manner. These students also appear to have lower grade point averages than other students. It appears that students who lack impression-management skills may be more likely to have problems at school and work. (Contains 1 note.)