Saturday, February 11, 2006

"I Don't Know What To Do To Make My Dreams Come True"

That's the plaint of a California student suing the state (with others) for its imposition of a standardized test as a prerequisite to graduation. The student has a 3.8 GPA but - somehow - cannot pass the English potion of the test because it requires her to "find the major themes of poems or articles".

Here's a thought on how to make your dream come true: learn how to find the major themes of poems or articles.

2 comments:

mythago said...

But what's the point of the exit exam? Either the school is doing its job in assigning grades--students who can't find the themese get an F in English Lit--or it's not. If it's not, it has no business pulling an exit exam out of its ass. "Show us all the skills you learned! Wait, we didn't actually teach them to you although we said we did? Too bad! Bwahahahaha!"

Robert said...

The school isn't pulling the exam out of anywhere - the state is. The point of the exit exam is to catch out those schools that hand out 3.8 GPAs to people who can't parse basic English text, and to prevent them from "graduating" uneducated people.