Moving the Goalposts

that is sad, but was that strictly in the UK? Spelling in the US has become a sad state ever since the increased use of the internet, and the invent of forums/blogs.
 
look here , this is also about the use of spelling, and the use of internet-email and texting with the phone....
 
Heard about this today on the radio. I am absolutely disgusted. It's an ENGLISH exam. Surely if cannot use English correctly you should be marked down. (rant, rave, youth of today, don't know their born, etc,etc)
 
Twice removed, still not enough to let 75 per cent testees pass

"We are not going through [pupils' scripts] saying this is wrong and that is wrong, we are looking at what pupils can do."...Since the change, the percentage of pupils reaching the expected standard in the English test has risen from 67 in 2002 to 71 in 2004. Over the same period, the QCA has lowered the pass mark in the test by an average of three marks.
It seems the change was meant to emphasize writing skills only at levels higher than the elementary and time consuming spelling that only reflects the amount of books read and the amount of finished writing the student has written. What harm could it have done for such minor offenses ? The rise in performance of 4 per cent, however, can be attributed to the lowering of pass mark by the average of three. Therefore it is difficult to conclude whether any testee benefited from the change in grading policy.

On the contrary, it can be argued that some students were more harshly marked down for failure to communicate their ideas even after misspellings were overlooked. The grader could have simply marked a sentence with some major misspellings as 'unintelligible.'

I don't know exactly how the new policy was conveyed to or received by the graders, yet they could have, either consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously, tried to achieve a balance by upward adjusting their level of tolerance for mistakes just to be fair. What I can say for sure is that one of the things the testees were found to be capable was to record idiosyncracies and dialectal variations in words such as 'Skool, xams, definitly, aint(sic. should be ain't for punctuation), beautfull, basicly, rember, favorite and occationally'. The dropping of unstressed vowels is a well known standard or dialectal variation widely observed. :)

The sad thing is that these great achievements went unnoticed; what great loss to linguistic understanding ! Another sad result is the inconsistency with which American spelling such as 'favorite' would not have been marked as incorrect, while American punctuating conventions such as 'unintelliglble.' would have. How about answers written in the Greek or the Cyrillic alphabet ? Vai el Hebrew ? :D
 
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Personally I fink its grate thatt yung peeple terday kan at larst find an open rode to universtee wivout avin ter bovver abowt a stoopid barrier lyke spellin proper.

I fink alot of them will be ayble ter show us all there troo kapabilitys wivout that unnecesary .... un-nessesa ....un.... unwanted millstone arowned there neks!

I trooly luck forwoord to reeding sum of there paypers in the footure.

?W????
 
It's an outrage !! I think it's one of the most important things u have to learn.I don't think employers in the future will be happy if the level of the workers'language has dropped by 60% :eek:kashii:

"Spelling and grammar are essential to good English and important in other subjects. The exam watchdog should be ensuring that proper marks are given for these. Not judging spelling on such an important paper sends the message to teacher and pupils that it does not matter, and that is certainly what employers are finding."
My point exactly !

"We are not going through [pupils' scripts] saying this is wrong and that is wrong, we are looking at what pupils can do."
Obviously not much if they ain't even know how to friggin spell ! :eek:

They just want to reach their goal of graduatees(is this word english ? :p )at the cost of English skills :eek:kashii:
 
Pursuant to my last post ... :) ... and in more serious vein ...

Since, I would assume, many if not most students are now producing much of their work on a word processor ... are they not capable of configuring their "spellchecker" fer Chrissakes!

The only people I can think of who may have a small excuse - are Canadians - who may not be able to decide as to wether or not to use American or British 'English' spelling convention from time to time. ....but since both are, strictly speaking, admissable in N.America ...even that becomes a non-issue.

... and how much does a bloody dictionary cost, anyhow?

Regards,

?W????
 
It seems to be a matter of "If you can't reach the goals, we'll just lower them until you can."

Downright retarded.
All about statistics, huh?
Wouldn't want our kids to seem dumb, would we?

Hmpf.. kids have probably never used the written word more than they do today, yet their spelling is degrading... it's ignorance at a high level. Unknowledge!
 

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