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Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006Text Speak allowed in NZ exams
"New Zealand's high school students will be able to use 'text-speak' - the mobile phone text message language beloved of teenagers - in national exams this year, officials said Friday." http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/061109/K110902U.html - D.B. > "New Zealand's high school students will be able to use 'text-speak' - > the mobile phone text message language beloved of teenagers - in > national exams this year, officials said Friday." > > http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/061109/K110902U.html What it actually says is what is always the case - if students use bad spellings or slang, they will get some credit for the work, but they'll lose marks. What else should be done - a student gets no marks at all for an essay in which the word "you" is written as "u", despite the essay otherwise making sense and answering the question? Matthew Huntbach > On Thu, 9 Nov 2006, thirty-seven wrote: > [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > "you" is written as "u", despite the essay otherwise making > sense and answering the question? That would be the case in my class, yes. If the kid can write the rest of the essay in standard English, then there's no excuse for using "u" instead of "you". I would fail it on style and spelling. The same would go for students writing AAVE instead of standard American, British, or International English. Unless, of course, it was my job to teach students who knew how to write only AAVE how to translate it into standard English. I do read AAVE, but not with enough fluency to enjoy it as a regular diet. Were I teaching AAVE speakers, however, I would have to educate myself to read and understand its spoken varieties. If I didn't, I would not be able to be a competent teacher for those students. I don't read texting language and will not spend the time trying to figure out what TML abbreviations might mean. I'm not into those kinds of word puzzles.  SignatureFranke: EFL teacher & medical editor Native speaker of American English; posting from Taiwan. Unmunged email: /at/easypeasy.com "Impatience is the mother of misery." >> On Thu, 9 Nov 2006, thirty-seven wrote: >>> "New Zealand's high school students will be able to use >>> 'text-speak' - the mobile phone text message language beloved >>> of teenagers - in national exams this year, officials said >>> Friday." >>> >>> http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/061109/K110902U.html >> What it actually says is what is always the case - if students >> use bad spellings or slang, they will get some credit for the >> work, but they'll lose marks. What else should be done - a >> student gets no marks at all for an essay in which the word >> "you" is written as "u", despite the essay otherwise making >> sense and answering the question? > That would be the case in my class, yes. If the kid can write the > rest of the essay in standard English, then there's no excuse for > using "u" instead of "you". I would fail it on style and spelling. Yes, but suppose the essay is otherwise perfect, a good answer to the question? Are you really going to give 0 marks? Will your decision be upheld if the kid goes to appeal? My point is this is something we are always going to have to deal with. We give partial marks to things which are partially right. One reason it may be partialy rather than fully right is the use of non-standard English. It seems to me this is what was behind the sensationalist heading "students will be allowed to use text speak". The article didn't really say that using this form of language would be considered as much acceptable as standard English. It was therefore non-news, typical journalists' filler. Matthew Huntbach >>> thirty-seven wrote: >>>> "New Zealand's high school students will be able to use >>>> 'text-speak' - the mobile phone text message language beloved [quoted text clipped - 26 lines] > be considered as much acceptable as standard English. It was > therefore non-news, typical journalists' filler. I realize that my experience is different -- it being in an engineering course -- but I am forever grateful to my Electrodynamics professor who gave a flat zero for a wrong answer to a problem, even if the only error was one in simple arithmetic, all else in solving the complex problem being perfect. His contention was that if you, as an engineer, were asked for an answer to a problem, and you came up with and presented a wrong one, you simply failed the task. That professor taught me to check my work and to pay attention to detail. It paid off in my career, as people learned trust my work. The drawback to this was that I was often called upon to check and fix other guys' stuff (usually in programming). In general, I support tough grading methods in developing new talent for scientific work. Lenience breeds sloppiness in effort, and that may cause costly or dangerous problems when the sloppiness spills over into one's career work. Let's face it -- it is a disservice to humanity when careless people are allowed to serve in jobs that demand the utmost care. Product recalls are not a good cure for that. SignatureSkitt (in Hayward, California) http://www.geocities.com/opus731/ 2006-11-10 <ov-dnQBxbcxKSMnYnZ2dnUVZ_ridnZ2d@comcast.com>, > I realize that my experience is different -- it being in an > engineering course -- but I am forever grateful to my Electrodynamics > professor who gave a flat zero for a wrong answer to a problem, even > if the only error was one in simple arithmetic, all else in solving > the complex problem being perfect. Did you also get a flat zero for the course for having once answered a single question wrong? > His contention was that if you, as an engineer, were asked for an > answer to a problem, and you came up with and presented a wrong one, > you simply failed the task. So how much time were you given to these assignments? Access to calculators/research/anything? a classroom does not approximate a real world situation. >> I realize that my experience is different -- it being in an >> engineering course -- but I am forever grateful to my Electrodynamics [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > Did you also get a flat zero for the course for having once answered > a single question wrong? Good grief, what made you ask something as stupid as that? >> His contention was that if you, as an engineer, were asked for an >> answer to a problem, and you came up with and presented a wrong one, >> you simply failed the task. > > So how much time were you given to these assignments? Enough to get the correct answer, if you knew your stuff. I might mention here that he tried to design his tests so that they wouldn't be completed in the time allotted. This was to give him a better idea of the capabilities of each student, not just the poorer ones. I earned his respect by correctly completing one or two of them. He came to my aid when I was put on probation for not doing homework (silly grunt work) in most of my courses. Yes, I was a very lazy student. > Access to calculators/research/anything? Some of his tests were open-book tests, but the problems were carefully selected so as not to present a problem from the book, just with different parameter values. Thinking was encouraged and, in fact, absolutely necessary. This was also before the electronic calculators (1954?). Slide rule had to suffice, and it did so quite well. Its use encouraged thinking to estimate the expected results beforehand. > a classroom does not approximate a real world situation. For sure -- one does not get fired or even sued for mistakes on tests. SignatureSkitt (in Hayward, California) http://www.geocities.com/opus731/ 2006-11-10 <3eidnVfmt_aNkcjYnZ2dnUVZ_t2dnZ2d@comcast.com>, >>> I realize that my experience is different -- it being in an >>> engineering course -- but I am forever grateful to my Electrodynamics [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > > Good grief, what made you ask something as stupid as that? The difference between that and what you have said happened is merely one of scale. >>>> I realize that my experience is different -- it being in an >>>> engineering course -- but I am forever grateful to my [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > The difference between that and what you have said happened is merely > one of scale. Yeah, but that is a huge difference -- sort of like between losing one set in a tennis match and not winning a single set in a whole season, but you knew that. SignatureSkitt (in Hayward, California) http://www.geocities.com/opus731/ 2006-11-11 <WrqdnQ8Sld0XvsjYnZ2dnUVZ_o6dnZ2d@comcast.com>, >>>>> I realize that my experience is different -- it being in an >>>>> engineering course -- but I am forever grateful to my [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > in a tennis match and not winning a single set in a whole season, but you > knew that. Yeah, but automatically losing a set if you lose even one game, or are scored against once would be the analogue for getting zero on a problem for making one mistake. And it's not really that far a stretch from there to being disqualified for a whole season. [note: i'm not all that solid on tennis analogies, but I think it works] > 2006-11-11 <WrqdnQ8Sld0XvsjYnZ2dnUVZ_o6dnZ2d@comcast.com>, >> [quoted text clipped - 25 lines] > [note: i'm not all that solid on tennis analogies, but I think > it works] Nah. Stupid question and stupid analogy. You fail. SignatureFranke: EFL teacher & medical editor Native speaker of American English; posting from Taiwan. Unmunged email: /at/easypeasy.com "Impatience is the mother of misery." >>>>>> I realize that my experience is different -- it being in an >>>>>> engineering course -- but I am forever grateful to my [quoted text clipped - 22 lines] > [note: i'm not all that solid on tennis analogies, but I think it > works] Omigosh, you sure have difficulties in grasping the idea. I was talking about coming up with the wrong result to a problem and earning a zero for that problem, not for the entire test. As for that scale thing, would you rather walk on very thin ice than very thick ice? After all, it's just a matter of scale. SignatureSkitt (in Hayward, California) http://www.geocities.com/opus731/ > Yeah, but automatically losing a set if you lose even one game, or > are scored against once would be the analogue for getting zero on a [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > [note: i'm not all that solid on tennis analogies, but I think it > works] If you want a tennis analogy, try this: if you miss the ball by an inch instead of by a mile, should you be given half a point? SignaturePeter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses. The optusnet address could disappear at any time. On 12 Nov 2006, Peter Moylan wrote >> Yeah, but automatically losing a set if you lose even one game, >> or are scored against once would be the analogue for getting [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > If you want a tennis analogy, try this: if you miss the ball by > an inch instead of by a mile, should you be given half a point? Easy analogy to knock down. Text-speak doesn't "miss the ball" at all: it gets the job done of transmitting meaning of a word. SignatureCheers, Harvey Canadian and British English, indiscriminately mixed For e-mail, change harvey.news to harvey.van > > Yeah, but automatically losing a set if you lose even one game, or > > are scored against once would be the analogue for getting zero on a [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > If you want a tennis analogy, try this: if you miss the ball by an inch > instead of by a mile, should you be given half a point? We're not talking any more about grading essays on New Zealand national exams, then? Can anyone explain how essays on exams like these are usually scored? Are points deducted, or accumulated, or what? How are small surface-y things like spelling weighed against major elements like logic and organization? Signaturec u l8r -- Donna Richoux > We're not talking any more about grading essays on New Zealand > national exams, then? [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > surface-y things like spelling weighed against major elements like > logic and organization? I think we're temporarily lacking any Kiwi regulars on the newsgroup, but I suspect that the NZ national exams are much the same as the Australian state-run ones. (The rules vary as to how much of a student's[1] final mark is determined by the school and how much is determined by external exams, but that's a different story.) The basic answer is that it depends on the subject. In an English exam, points would certainly be deducted for bad spelling or grammar. In a mathematics exam, examiners would be more likely to be tolerant of poor English, although of course they would be tough on mathematical errors. In something like physics, the examiners would be tough on errors in the terms of art of that subject (e.g. confusing "metres" and "square metres") but wouldn't deduct any marks for confusing "there" and "their". Textspeak would, I suspect, irritate an examiner to the point of being tough on things that otherwise would be treated leniently. I can imagine an entire paragraph being ignored in the marking because it was illegible. (Bad handwriting also irritates examiners. Arguments are supposed to be presented clearly, whatever the subject, and forcing the reader to re-read a passage several times to figure out the meaning does not qualify as clear presentation.) On the other hand, there is political pressure at all levels to improve "productivity", i.e. to ensure that pass rates are high.This puts pressure on examiners to give the candidate the benefit in marginal cases. There's a growing tendency to use multiple-choice questions in some subjects, probably on the grounds of their being easy to mark, and in that case there is no middle ground: an answer is either totally correct or totally wrong. Apart from that special case, the general rule is that partially acceptable answers get partial marks, even in the cases Skitt was talking about where the final answer is wrong. SignaturePeter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses. The optusnet address could disappear at any time. >> Yeah, but automatically losing a set if you lose even one game, or >> are scored against once would be the analogue for getting zero on a [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > If you want a tennis analogy, try this: if you miss the ball by an inch > instead of by a mile, should you be given half a point? Works in a way in Aussie football. SignatureRob Bannister > Skitt wrote: >> [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > The difference between that and what you have said happened is > merely one of scale. No, you're not talking about the difference between a twenty-dollar whore and a $2,000 Park Avenue callgirl. A prostitute is a prostitute whatever he or she is called. And don't forget the straw that broke the camel's back: a difference of scale that made all the difference between life and death. You'd better brush up on analogies. SignatureFranke: EFL teacher & medical editor Native speaker of American English; posting from Taiwan. Unmunged email: /at/easypeasy.com "Impatience is the mother of misery." > Enough to get the correct answer, if you knew your stuff. I might > mention here that he tried to design his tests so that they wouldn't [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > (silly grunt work) in most of my courses. Yes, I was a very lazy > student. In my final undergraduate year, the final mathematics exam was of the form "Attempt any 5 of the 7 questions." I couldn't decide which ones to tackle, so I did them all. This earnt me a letter from the head of mathematics - someone I'd never met - asking whether I was interested in postgraduate work in mathematics. In effect, that's what I ended up doing; but in an EE department. > absolutely necessary. This was also before the electronic > calculators (1954?). Slide rule had to suffice, and it did so quite > well. Its use encouraged thinking to estimate the expected results > beforehand. As an academic, I tried to get students to do this, and even made a point of never taking a calculator to tutorials so that I had to work out rough answers in my head, just to show how it could be done. It was all in vain. Students were hooked on their calculators and their computers, and couldn't even see how to apply reality checks. Example: you could present a right-angled triangle with two sides 3 mm and 4 mm long, and ask for the length of the hypotenuse, and someone would be sure to come up with an answer like 5 million km. Didn't it occur to him that the answer looked a little implausible? Apparently not; that's what the calculator said, so that was the right answer. I did try to get calculators banned from my examinations, but that fell foul of a university-wide policy. My teaching assistant felt even more strongly about it. He'd look at what a student had done in a lab, and say something like "Two years from now you're supposed to become an engineer. The mistake you just made would have cost your company several million dollars, and you might even have killed a few people. How long do you think you're going to keep your job?" (It's tough being a lab supervisor in an EE student lab, because of having to collect and tag all of the equipment that's been damaged beyond repair. For many students, the reality check is of the form "Let's try this and see what happens.") These days students are banned from laboratories until they have achieved 100% on a safety exam, but not even that is sufficient. I once suggested including a test where a bare high-voltage wire was strung across a lab doorway, to see who ducked, but the university's insurers wouldn't approve it. SignaturePeter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses. The optusnet address could disappear at any time. >In my final undergraduate year, the final mathematics exam was of the >form "Attempt any 5 of the 7 questions." I couldn't decide which ones to >tackle, so I did them all. This earnt me a letter from the head of >mathematics - someone I'd never met - asking whether I was interested in >postgraduate work in mathematics. In effect, that's what I ended up >doing; but in an EE department. In Spain nowadays it'd probably get you an e-mail from the auxiliary deputy assistant dean (acting) of the science faculty -- someone you'd not only never met but didn't even know existed -- asking what on earth, since you were evidently incapable of distinguishing between the numbers five and seven, you thought you were doing on a mathematics degree course. SignatureMillicent Tendency (TEFKATHE) >>>> thirty-seven wrote: > [quoted text clipped - 54 lines] > to serve in jobs that demand the utmost care. Product recalls > are not a good cure for that. Amen, brother. Would that most of us thought this way. Well, acutally, those who don't don't really think, they "feel" instead. Feeling is no substitute for thinking; neither, however, is thinking a substitute for feeling. Each in its proper place and everyone except the undeserving is better off in all the ways that count. SignatureFranke: EFL teacher & medical editor Native speaker of American English; posting from Taiwan. Unmunged email: /at/easypeasy.com "Impatience is the mother of misery." [about no partial credit] His contention was that if you, as an engineer, were asked for an answer to a problem, and you came up with and presented a wrong one, you simply failed the task. When the robotic work force arrives this old saw may actually happen: "Get a minus sign wrong in the right place and then the bridge comes out upside down." -- --------------------------------------------- Richard Maurer To reply, remove half Sunnyvale, California of a homonym of a synonym for also. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > [about no partial credit] > His contention was that if you, as an engineer, [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > "Get a minus sign wrong in the right place > and then the bridge comes out upside down." Don't laugh, but in programming, a very slight error -- say, a plus sign where a minus should have been -- can be quite unnoticeable in certain situations, but it can cause dire consequences in the results. I repeat -- discouragement of sloppy work should be part of education. Unfortunately, it seldom is. I'm not all that enthused about "grading on the curve" either. It hides deficiencies in both the students and the teachers, and the results are often mediocre. I learned the most from teachers who used a strict grading system without regard of score distribution. I am assuming a competent test designer, of course. SignatureSkitt (in Hayward, California) http://www.geocities.com/opus731/ On 10 Nov 2006, Matthew Huntbach wrote > Yes, but suppose the essay is otherwise perfect, a good answer > to the question? Are you really going to give 0 marks? Will your > decision be upheld if the kid goes to appeal? I agree. If one is failed -- completely, not just marked down -- for spelling "you" as "u", then clearly "could of" is an automatic failure even if the rest of the paper is "A" material. Evolving variant spellings aren't standard, and deserve marking down -- but they're not automatic failure fodder, anymore than a dangling preposition is. SignatureCheers, Harvey Canadian and British English, indiscriminately mixed For e-mail, change harvey.news to harvey.van > On 10 Nov 2006, Matthew Huntbach wrote > [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > down -- but they're not automatic failure fodder, anymore than a > dangling preposition is. In my writing class, I would fail anyone who wrote "could of" instead of "could have", yes. But there is no necessary relationship between misplaced modifiers and these unnecessary spelling and proofreading errors. The rules I have about spelling and proofreading are arbitrary and do not imply at all that just any old grammatical, syntactic, semantic, structural, or stylistic error will garner a failure. I don't understand how you can jump to that unwarranted conclusion. No, I do understand: you're obviously not a teacher. Pedagogical methods are no more logical to the uninitiated than are idioms. If I were as absurd in my thinking as your remark here suggests that you think I am, or that you are, then I would bitch at people in this NG -- most of whom know better -- for making grammatical, syntactic, semantic, structural, or stylistic errors. I don't much care if everyone does; this is the Internet, not an English test. We all make mistakes. I make my share every day, and on some days, more than my share. When I do bitch at people for such errors, I'm attacking them for one reason or another, as I've done in the recent post by "TE Chea" <4ws@gmail.com>, who uses "any1" instead of "anyone". In this poster's case, however, the alternative is the killfile, not tolerance or acceptance. And if any of the RRs here regularly started using texting language in their posts, they'd go unread as well, just as the language reformer Her(r)on Stone (the guy who wants to start all setences with what standard English uses as sentence-final punctuation) does: not for his content but for his offensively unreadable style. When Arthur Hailey's novel _Wheels_ came out in 1971, I read the first sentence and put it down forever. It might have been a good read had I been able to stomach that first sentence, but I wasn't able to. I don't a judge a book by its title or cover but by the quality of the author's writing. That may be a hurtful or wrongful basis for judging written work, but I don't think so. And as much as I love Roald Dahl's stories, I wince far too often at his prose. It is obvious that he sometimes wasn't paying attention to how he said things. But I have no problems buying rather than borrowing his books. When I read them to my son at night, I frequently change his objectionable usages, though. SignatureFranke: EFL teacher & medical editor Native speaker of American English; posting from Taiwan. Unmunged email: /at/easypeasy.com "Impatience is the mother of misery." > On 10 Nov 2006, Matthew Huntbach wrote > [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > -- but they're not automatic failure fodder, anymore than a dangling > preposition is. A script that might otherwise comfortably gain a pass mark could be failed on account of a few errors in spelling or grammar. That's quite close to automatic failure. As a teacher, admittedly in selective schools, I found that many boys could be jolted into compliance by the deduction of half a point for every blunder: "18 out of 20, but recorded as 15 because of six mistakes in English". That was in day-to-day work, not exams. One self-confident Cambridge applicant (for a history scholarship) couldn't or wouldn't break the habit of using a comma where a full stop or semicolon was required. When (lying through my teeth) I told him that this fault alone would cause his instant rejection, he meekly asked for a tutorial on the topic and was miraculously cured overnight. Alan Jones >> "New Zealand's high school students will be able to use >> 'text-speak' - the mobile phone text message language beloved of [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > marks at all for an essay in which the word "you" is written as "u", > despite the essay otherwise making sense and answering the question? An occasional "u" can be tolerated, but will examiners be able to understand the content if true text-speak is used? I note that the cited article had to provide translations, as if they were quoting sentences in a foreign language. My own local newspaper allows a small number of texted messages to appear on the "Letters to the Editor" page. Half the time I can't figure out what the writer is trying to say. SignaturePeter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses. The optusnet address could disappear at any time. >> http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/061109/K110902U.html > [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > at all for an essay in which the word "you" is written as "u", despite > the essay otherwise making sense and answering the question? I was surprised at "Confident that those grading papers would understand answers written in text-speak, Haque stressed...". Something I always stressed to my students was that examination markers get paid for the number of papers they mark and that they are not going to waste time trying to figure out what a student may or may not have meant; that it is the student's responsibility to express themselves clearly and that this includes handwriting. Unless the examination is testing English or a foreign language, spelling, slang, etc. should, in my opinion, never be penalised directly. However, indirect penalties, resulting from a marker's inability to make sense of a student's slang, scribble or weird spelling, are something all students must accept. SignatureRob Bannister >>> http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/061109/K110902U.html >> [quoted text clipped - 17 lines] > inability to make sense of a student's slang, scribble or weird > spelling, are something all students must accept. My opinion is that not marking spelling errors and nopt discouraging slang is a disservice to the student. After all, those things may well have an influence on that student's success or lack of it in the working world. After all, communication, be it oral or written, is important in most jobs that require a college education, and it is the job of college professors to do their best in grooming it, even when it is not the primary subject of the course. Sadly, there are many professors who lack the proper skills for doing that, and they can thank their former educators for it. SignatureSkitt (in Hayward, California) http://www.geocities.com/opus731/ >After all, communication, be it oral or written, is important in most jobs >that require a college education, and it is the job of college professors to >do their best in grooming it, even when it is not the primary subject of the >course. Sadly, there are many professors who lack the proper skills for >doing that, and they can thank their former educators for it. Many top-tier schools have a "communication" requirement of this sort, and these have gotten more popular and more stringent. At UVM sixteen years ago, our only requirement was to pass a course entitled "Principles of Speech Communication", which was about making effective oral presentations (an essential skill for those of my cohort who went on to graduate school). The trend is away from specialized courses such as that and toward integrating the communication requirment into specific subject curricula. Undergraduate students at my current employer must take two "communications intensive" courses in their major subject and two "communications intensive" humanities electives. (See, for example, <http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/general.html#writing>, which describes how one [highly respected and influential] course handles this requirement.) -GAWollman SignatureGarrett A. Wollman | The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are wollman@csail.mit.edu| nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry Opinions not those | grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape of MIT or CSAIL. | our history. - S.J. Gould, Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness > >>> http://www.cbc.ca/cp/Oddities/061109/K110902U.html > >> What it actually says is what is always the case - if students use > >> bad spellings or slang, they will get some credit for the work, but > >> they'll lose marks. What else should be done - a student gets no > >> marks at all for an essay in which the word "you" is written as "u", > >> despite the essay otherwise making sense and answering the question? > > I was surprised at "Confident that those grading papers would > > understand answers written in text-speak, Haque stressed...". [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > > inability to make sense of a student's slang, scribble or weird > > spelling, are something all students must accept. > My opinion is that not marking spelling errors and nopt discouraging slang > is a disservice to the student. After all, those things may well have an > influence on that student's success or lack of it in the working world. The article in question says the New Zealand Qualifications Authority "still strongly discourages students from using anything other than full English". Thus, as I said, it's journalistic sensationalism. The impression given by the headline is that essays written entirely in text speak will be accepted, maybe even encouraged. The details in the article show this is clearly not the case. Anyway, Skitt is failed with 0 marks for his "nopt" typo. A disgrace, which if permitted could lead to bridges falling down. Matthew Huntbach >> My opinion is that not marking spelling errors and nopt discouraging >> slang is a disservice to the student. After all, those things may [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > Anyway, Skitt is failed with 0 marks for his "nopt" typo. A disgrace, > which if permitted could lead to bridges falling down. That's right -- I committed a typo (a fat finger hit two keys, and I don't use a spelling checker). You are almost right in giving me a zero. As it is, though, you appear to have forgotten that the zero marks I was talking about pertained to engineering problem answers. I do believe that you understood that and now have noticed the difference. Am I also to understand that you somehow find my views on strict grading objectionable, and therefore you delight in catching me in a typo? I'd hate to think that, but it sure looks like it. Oh, well ... SignatureSkitt (in Hayward, California) http://www.geocities.com/opus731/ > Matthew Huntbach wrote: > [quoted text clipped - 18 lines] > typo? I'd hate to think that, but it sure looks like it. Oh, > well ... I know for a fact that he blames everyone else's errors on their having listened to Mary Maloney instead of to him. SignatureFranke: EFL teacher & medical editor Native speaker of American English; posting from Taiwan. Unmunged email: /at/easypeasy.com "Impatience is the mother of misery." >> Unless the examination is testing English or a foreign language, >> spelling, slang, etc. should, in my opinion, never be penalised [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > lack the proper skills for doing that, and they can thank their former > educators for it. I think we have to distinguish between normal, assessed work (assignments, homework) and examinations. In the former, I would always correct spelling and grammatical errors, but not deduct marks unless it was a test of those skills. Examinations are different: the student usually does not get the paper back, so comment are pointless, and I still believe an examination should be marked on what it is testing. Now, it may well be that a history essay should also be marked on its use of English, but I don't think that applies in Maths or Science. This does not mean that writing skills should be ignored by the teacher. No-one understands what is happening at the moment in West Australian education, but in my time, every subject area had to demonstrate that it was contributing to the improvement of literacy and numeracy skills. This, to my mind, is best done during the course of normal assignments and not in examinations unless that is what the examination is about. SignatureRob Bannister |
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