Should I point out typos on students' important forms that I am signing? A prior student of mine is applying for a prestigious certificate in her field. She is asked to list relevant accomplishments. I was asked by the student to sign a this verification form since I am in a position to do just that: verify the accomplishments. Upon reading the accomplishments, I noticed a misspelled word. It's one of those words that is commonly misspelled, and I suspect this will limit her chances of being accepted.

Should I mention this to the student prior to signing my name? I am torn between wanting this student to succeed and having the student be self-reliant.

Additional info about this student: This student is only a "student" in that he was in a professional development course that I had a hand in teaching. He is actually a practicing K-12 teacher.


There was some discussion about the nature of the misspelling. The two words confused were colleague and college.

I suppose the term self-reliant was a poor choice by me in my original question. My question is more accurately stated as Should I point out the typos when the student was not directly asking for such feedback. It is not my intention to teach the student a lesson, as my question came across.
I would point out the error, especially if you have a reason to believe it will be taken into account in some nontrivial way.

I don't really understand why doing this goes against the student's "self-reliance".  I point out errors of this kind in papers that I am refereeing, for instance, and when people read my own papers or course notes or whatever, they sometimes point out my own typos including spelling errors.* I don't think that either I or these other adult academic professionals are failing to show self-reliance.

*: I do all my writing on a version of LaTeX with disabled spell-checking, so I have to spell my words correctly "the old-fashioned way".  Mistakes do sometimes creep in.  I could be setting things up better, but anyway the New York Times occasionally has spelling mistakes.