Bad grammar tests I: The Third World Challenge

As part of the publicity for the documentary “Two Million Minutes”, which examines the differences in the high school lives of students in the U.S., India, and China, its executive producer has created a quiz called the Third World Challenge.  He claims that it is representative of the test that Indian 10th grade students must pass in order to move on to 11th grade.  Being interested in education reform and seeing that the test included a grammar section (English grammar, no less!), I was compelled to take it.  But as soon as I started, I became disillusioned.  Firstly, this was clearly not an American English grammar test, and secondly, many of the questions weren’t about grammar at all.

PART I: THE GRAMMAR OF THE QUESTIONS

Let me start by backing up my claim that the test was not on American English grammar.  Judging from the preface to the test, it’s intended to be taken by an American audience, so it’s only fair to test them on American English grammar.  But looking at some of the questions, we see that whatever form of English is being used (Indian English, perhaps?), it’s not Standard American English.

Question 3: The Oxford University conferred the Doctorate _____ him.

Americans do not refer to Oxford as “The Oxford University”.  Neither, it seems, do the Brits, nor much of anyone else for that matter. First off, it’s properly “University of Oxford”, according to the school’s website, and that may or may not be prefaced with the.  But Oxford University is acceptable to many people (incl. me), and Googling for “oxford university” shows a ton of usages of it. Googling “The Oxford University” returns a lot of hits (888,000) as well, but of the first 40, every single one is part of a larger phrase, such as “The Oxford University Press”, “The Oxford University Sports Federation”, “The Oxford University appeal”.  There weren’t any that were just The Oxford University.

Basically, it appears that compound nouns that start with Oxford University can be arthrous (introduced by the article the, as discussed at length by Arnold Zwicky), but Oxford University itself is anarthrous (not introduced by an article).  The same is true of many other universities; no one I know would say that they went to the Princeton University, but they might say that they were part of the Princeton University band.  Now, I can’t speak much about Indian English, and maybe some people do prefer “the Oxford University”.  But in my grammar, that sounds distinctly nonstandard.  And some quick searching through the British National Corpus (BNC) seems to agree with me.  So that’s one point off. There’s a similar article problem in question 15, which is unintentionally hilarious:

Question 15: ‘Can I come in, please?’ ‘You can, if you have the legs with feet’.

(Ha ha! Comeuppance for the grammar snob!  It’s like when someone, say your third grade classmate, tells you that you suck at basketball because you can’t make a lay-up, and then that kid goes to do a lay-up, but misses the basket and has the ball come right back down on his head, knocking down most uproariously, and you get to stand over him and yell “Ha ha, Brian, you putz!”.  But I digress!)

There’re a few other weird grammar things in the grammar part of the test, but none that lend themselves to interesting commentary. Instead, I’m going to skip over to the history section, where things really go off the rails:

Question: Non-aligned movement where all members have an equal say is naturally equipped with greater scope and potential than the UN whose performance is monopolized and restricted by veto powers of it 5 permanent members. State true or false.

There had been some more grammatical curiosities in the first few questions of the history part, but this one set my head a-pounding.  There’s a typographical error (it for its), at least one incorrectly article-less NP (Non-Aligned Movement and in my opinion, veto powers as well), and it’s written nearly incomprehensibly.  If surviving reading a test like this is what it takes to stay competitive in the global marketplace, then I will patiently await my outsourcing.

(I just want to remind everyone that I am only being critical of the grammar because the test purports to be a test of grammar.  My familiarity with Subcontinental English is extremely limited, and what little experience I do have is primarily with Pakistani English.  Perhaps these grammatical oddities are standard in Indian English.  In that case, this would be a more reasonable test to Indian students than to American students. It is presented as though it is intended for speakers of American English, though, and clearly it isn’t.  Please do not construe my comments to imply a xenophobic distaste for people who do not use the same form of English as I do. You are, however, welcome to construe my comments to imply a distaste for purveyors of bad grammar tests.)

PART II: THESE ARE NOT GRAMMAR QUESTIONS

All right, so it’s clear that this is not a grammar test for any variety of English that I’m familiar with.  Is it even a grammar test at all? I’m going to say no; what it’s testing could perhaps generally be considered “usage” of the language, but even that doesn’t seem a broad enough label. The first question starts it off:

Question 1: My young son [could/had to/can] speak English when we lived in London.

So which modal is correct here?  Well, can isn’t, because the sentence’s tenses don’t agree.  But both could and had to are equally fine here; the former says that the son was able to speak English and the latter says that he was forced to. There is absolutely no way to decide between these without additional information. The correct answer according to the test is “could”. I don’t know why.

Then the next question asks about the tone/mood that a sentence conveys, and the answer is “nostalgic”. This is so not grammar.

Skipping ahead, the fifth question is about the meaning of no sooner, and claims that no sooner means the same as as soon as. I don’t think that’s the case at all; no sooner usually means “immediately or very shortly after”. But that’s not an option on this test.

The sixth question asks us to pick the “most appropriate” preposition for this sentence: The batter hit the ball [of/over/at/on] the fence. Grammatically, none of these are wrong, and any of the last three options are reasonable to use in this sentence. Over is the desired answer, but that’s only the best choice in the context of competent baseballers. T-ballers could practice by hitting balls on fences, and young baseballers tend to hit more balls at the fences than over them. But none of these is any more or less grammatical than the others.

Question 8 asks for the meaning of a word (hope) and then has the correct answer being the meaning of the phrase containing the word (hoping against hope).  And that was all I could take.

I don’t know what this test is really testing, but it’s not grammar, and it isn’t even usage.  If this is really what the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education test is like, then for the love of all that is holy, please do not agitate in favor of its adoption anywhere else.  (I’ve poked around a little, and it seems that the ICSE test does ask similar questions to this, but not as multiple choice.  Well, that’s good in that presumably there are multiple acceptable answers, but these questions still suck, and they depend on things like preposition choice, which native speakers often don’t agree on.)

[By the way, if you happen to know anything about ICSE, or the Indian testing system in general, I’d be extremely interested in learning if this is at all an accurate portrayal of the country’s tests.]

Thou art euen the man now, dog

“Then sayde Nathan vnto Dauid: Thou art euen the man.”

That’s from the Coverdale Bible, printed in 1535, the first Modern English translation of both testaments of the Bible.  As you can see, it’s not just Modern English but surprisingly Modern English.  At least, aside from the spelling convention that u and v were both written as v word-initially and u word-internally. And the use of thou art. Also, even doesn’t get used like that anymore (I believe it is supposed to mean “precisely” in this context). Okay, so there’s a lot of differences. But just try and tell me you’re not picturing Sean Connery right now, straight out of Finding Forrester, bellowing “THOU ART EVEN THE MAN NOW DOG“.  What, that scene’s not commandeering your mind right now?  How I envy you, then.

Anyway, I guess the big point here is that language often comes full circle; what is now known as slang was once used in the Bible, blah blah blah.  I’m sorry, I still have Sean Connery stuck on a loop in my head.

An honestly bad dangling participle

I’m not particularly against dangling participles, unlike most prescriptivists, who find few things more amusing than a misplaced modifier:

“Here’s an example: Walking along the beach, the sun rose majestically over the ocean. Now, that’s a nice trick. This sentence has the sun walking along the beach!”

This willingness to accept dangling participles, I suspect, is because I am a psycholinguist.  As a psycholinguist, I’m more concerned with how comprehensible a sentence is than with how precisely linked the modifiers are.  I see no real problem with the above example, because walking along the beach clearly doesn’t modify the sun, and it’s pretty obvious that the intended antecedent is the speaker, or whoever has recently been discussed in the discourse.

That said, there are certain situations where dangling participles really are downright confusing, confounding, or at least distracting. For instance, a recent Snopes article explains the story of Michael Monsoor, the second-most recent recipient of the Medal of Honor, who jumped on a grenade to save his fellow SEALs.  It’s a well-deserved honor for a heroic action, but, being a linguist I was distracted by this pair of sentences in the Navy’s Summary of Action:

“He was located closest to the egress route out of the sniper hide-sight watching for enemy activity through a tactical periscope over the parapet wall. While vigilantly watching for enemy activity, an enemy fighter hurled a hand grenade onto the roof from an unseen location.”

This is something of a train wreck. The dangling participle at the start of the second sentence awkwardly repeats the end of the first sentence, even re-using the same phrase.  But worse, it’s completely unclear who the dangling participle is supposed to refer to.  Both Petty Officer Monsoor and the enemy fighter are reasonable referents for the participle; either could have been watching for their enemies.  Under the assumption that enemy always refers to the non-Americans, and using the repetition from the previous sentence, we can infer that the participle probably describes Petty Officer Monsoor. But we can’t be sure.  This is realistically ambiguous, unlike the “sun walking on the beach” example.

What’s odd is that, while the Summary of Action has this tangled mess, the official citation for the Medal says the same thing quite clearly:

“WHILE THE SEALS VIGILANTLY WATCHED FOR ENEMY ACTIVITY, AN INSURGENT THREW A HAND GRENADE FROM AN UNSEEN LOCATION, WHICH BOUNCED OFF PETTY OFFICER MONSOOR’S CHEST AND LANDED IN FRONT OF HIM.”

Now there’s a good example of how to rewrite a confusing dangling participle sentence.  The dangling participle has been converted to a temporal phrase that can only modify the sentence as a whole.  Much better, free of any important ambiguity, and a more fitting description of the action.  This is the sort of situation that prescriptivists ought to be citing when they talk about the horrors of dangling participles — not silly potential ambiguities that no reasonable reader would misinterpret, but real, true, and problematic ambiguities. Instead, by focusing on acceptably misplaced modifiers, prescriptivists’s complaints and advice come across full of sound and fury, but largely ignorable.

Metapost: Shirt, Math, SATs

I apologize for all the writing I didn’t do over the past few weeks, but now I’m well-rested from a couple weeks in Mountain View, and it’s back to work.  I’m planning to start a series on the inherent failures of the SAT’s grammar and usage section in the coming weeks.  You’re welcome to pester me if I don’t start it soon.

Secondly, my old and dear college roommate, who unlike me had the gumption to remain a mathemagician, has started up a blog about mathematics in every-day life.  (If you’re already reading a grammar blog, you’re certainly enough of a nerd to enjoy a math blog, by the way.)  I was blown away by the list of things not to say to a mathematician (having endured all of them in my math years), and the rest of it’s pretty killer as well.

Finally, some of you may know that I am something of a shirt collector.  Whenever I go to a new town, I try to find a shirt in a local thrift store to commemorate the trip — a Stanford Office of Technology Licensing polo, an Oxnard Yellowjackets tee, or a Three Rivers Stadium peanut vendor uniform.  Thus the “incorrigible” T-shirt that mr.write, proprietor of Uppity Shirts, was kind enough to send me, is quite a score.  In addition to being a cool word and doubling the number of white-text-on-black-background shirts in my collection, it’s got a special (inspirational) meaning to me.  Plus, I think it’s worth being incorrigible in your grammar; too many grammar snobs want you to change without telling you why.  Have the gumption to stand up them, I say!  (Regrettably, the Motivated Grammar spokesmodel was out of the office, but like any good executive, the CEO was more than willing to step in for a photo-op.)