Claims that the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory-3 (SASSI-3; F. G. Miller & L. E. Lazowski, 1999) defeats defensiveness have not been independently verified. This study investigates the SASSI-3's ability to discriminate faking (faking good, problem denial; faking good, claiming extreme virtue; faking bad) from standard answering. Although the results suggest that the Defensiveness scale detects faking, the Subtle Attributes scale was manipulated. These results call into question the SASSI-3's utility in detecting substance dependence among college students. (Contains 1 table.)