In 2023, Mark Kislingbury gave an interview to the Journal of Court Reporting after winning his sixth national realtime championship. He was asked why he competed for so long.
His answer was direct.
"One of my main reasons for competing," he said, "was that it would provide a platform of credibility for when I share with students and reporters how important it is to write short."
That sentence is the key to understanding everything that followed.
The Diagnosis: Stroke-Intensive Court Reporting Theories
Kislingbury's diagnosis of the court reporting dropout crisis has been consistent for over two decades. Stroke-intensive theories, he argued, made it "nearly impossible" for students to graduate by forcing them to write two, three, or four strokes for common words. Fingers couldn't move fast enough. Students left.
The cure was short writing. His short writing.
"I truly believe that the StenoMaster Theory is revolutionizing the profession in the direction of faster graduation rates and excellent realtime," he wrote.
That was a promise.
Building the Platform of Credibility
The architecture of what followed was deliberate. He entered the inaugural NCRA Realtime Contest in 1999 and won it four consecutive years. The Speed Contest twice. A Guinness World Record in 2004. Two corporations, four books, and the Mark Kislingbury Academy of Court Reporting in 2011.
The competition record built the credibility. The credibility sold the books. The academy enrolled the students. He said as much himself: the contests were for the platform.
And the promise of that platform rested on one testable claim — that his method produced better graduation outcomes than the theories he spent decades criticizing.
The Reality of Court Reporting School Failure Rates
The data doesn't support that claim.
The Mark Kislingbury Academy does not publicly publish its graduation rates. What the industry has are the consistent, direct reports of its own students: when prospective enrollees asked the academy about its graduation rate, they were told it was "really low." Students defending the program noted that every school says the same thing.
That's the point exactly.
State-level enrollment and completion data confirms what the students report: the attrition crisis remains unsolved across every theory, at every program. If his academy carries the same catastrophic failure rate as the stroke-intensive schools he spent decades blaming, his theory is not the cure he promised.
Stroke count was not the primary cause.
Kislingbury traded physical difficulty for cognitive difficulty. Where stroke-intensive theories demanded that fingers move faster, Magnum Steno demands that students memorize thousands of brief forms and phrase endings. For the ninety percent who fail, the mechanism shifts — but the failure doesn't.
You cannot solve a load problem by moving the load.
Speed vs. Accuracy in Realtime Reporting
That's not the only problem.
In that same 2023 interview, Kislingbury described the speed contest as a format where "accuracy can suffer a bit." The very skill he built his platform on — realtime reporting — exists because accuracy cannot suffer at all. A realtime feed during a deposition is a legal record. The client watching cannot use output that isn't readable.
The job is accuracy. Not speed.
Speed without accuracy in this profession isn't impressive. It's a mistrial.
The job was never about writing fast. It was about writing a record that holds up in a courtroom. Winning a speed contest and credentialing a teaching philosophy on that win is to confuse the contest for the job.
The Continued Claim
Kislingbury's initial intent may have been entirely genuine. The problem is no longer intent. It's the continued claim.
When the same or worse failure rate appears at his academy as at every other school, the honest response is to say: your theory is not the fix you market it as.
That admission hasn't come. The Guinness record still anchors the biography. The championships still "credential" the teaching. The academy still markets that students can reach "up to an amazing 338 words per minute." The dropout rate hasn't moved.
He spent 28 years proving he could write fast. Fast, he said, is what makes you credible. Fast is what makes you worth listening to.
The results are in.
His students don't graduate.
What does that do to his credibility?
Tom Fernicola is the author of The Science of Steno: Why Court Reporting Is So Hard — and What the Math Proves, available at brevitysteno.com. His research draws on 14 years of Texas Workforce Commission enrollment and completion data obtained through public records request R010658.