The media have been reporting various entries sent in to the Times Higher Education’s “exam howlers” competition. According to one student, the UK has an electoral system known as “first parcel post”.
I had a student on one occasion who wrote “the Prime Minister has the power of disillusion”. I had to point out that, though true, it was not a power confined to the Prime Minister.
I find that I make a great number of typographical and mechanical errors in this format and duly salute those who do not and I also recognize the great number of good students I have had who have done remarkably solid exams under pressure. However, the pressure of exams does somtimes lead to amazingly convuluted and bizarre assertions.
Perhaps the British do not experience this in their leadership to the same degree as some of the rest of us. I spent some of my youth in Mexico and still get an empathetic smile remebering a speech given by a Prsidential Candidate (when the PRI could not actually lose) who was quoted by all my friends. The English translation of his extemporaneous remark would be “This policy neither harms us nor does it benefit us — rather the contrary is true.”
One can only believe he must have sighed with relief as he first managed to address all his critics. However, after the exam-like pressure ended he was left with the quote which seemed less effective than desired.
Reading from this Link there are some amazing answers. I think the final paragraph from the University of Central Lancashire is…
😯 🙄
I don’t know why, and sad as it is, this really does not surprise me! Am I a cynic at 23? Perhaps!
Was that at A-Level or GCSE?
I would like to think this was a real GCSE answer:
Q: Use the word “judicious” in a sentence to show you understand its meaning.
A : Hands that judicious can be soft as your face.
Very enjoyable Lord Norton and Croft. I found these heartening as everything — barring the person believing France is a very backward place and ‘Total Retake’ — consisted of silly Freudian slips or plain old mis-spellings.
We are only human after all. Google are working on technology that will help, pretty impressive stuff.
If postal voting fraud is not prevented, it might well become a case of a ‘first parcel post’.
Howridiculous.
Frank W. Summers III: Indeed, some mistakes may be the result of pressure – such as, doubtless, the Spoonerism identified in the article to which Croft provides a link. Sometimes there is a simple typographical error. I noticed, for example, that yesterday someone reached this site by typing in ‘Richard the Loinheart’. There are various American Presidents who have come out with statements that would match those of the Mexican President. George W. Bush is a case in point, though Gerald Ford also had his moments.
Croft: I did wonder about doing a link to the article, but wasn’t sure if it would be appropriate for some of our more delicate readers!
Curious Black Cat: Wait until you are 24.
ladytizzy: The joke makes me feel better about some of the ones I tell!
Liam: I did think about raising the issue of humour and how it differs from country to country. There is a distinct British sense of humour.
howridiculous: There is sometimes an element of truth in the comments. Your observation may also illustrate the nature of the British sense of humour.
Lord Norton: I wasn’t sure if you had been rushed or censoring for content but I assumed you would block the post if you were concerned.
I suspect the exam howlers are minor compared to some of the errors in lecture notes where a whole room full of horrified faces greet some new and unusually named person or place whose spelling can only be guessed at quickly and rationalised in the bar afterwards!
Croft: I am not a great one for censorship and by letting you provide the link I can blame you anyway! I have read exam scripts and essays which certainly demonstrate your point that some names and concepts have not been well understood. If you ask for examples, though, I may have to give the response that President Eisenhower gave when asked to identify some of the achievements of his Vice-President, Richard Nixon: “Give me a few hours and I will think of something”.
Curious Black Cat: I should have added that the examples mentioned in the TES survey, as well as the one I give, are at undergraduate level.
I think this is hilarious
ladytizzy
I’ve always used that judicious stuff. I also remember that cat food that was ‘enriched with nourishing Marylebone jelly’.
As a copyeditor who does quite a bit of work outsourced from major government departments, I would dearly love to write an article on the howlers I’ve seen from people who don’t have the excuse of being a student writing to an exam deadline. In the same report, for instance, I learned of the existence of three countries I’d never heard of before: the ‘Chezk Republic’, ‘Jordon’, and ‘Sir Lanka’. Perhaps these countries have ‘first parcel post’ electoral systems, too?
tobedwithatrollope: It is very worrying. I have come across various howlers that have actually made it to print, be it in reports or newspapers. I suspect newspapers are shedding sub-editors. The Hull Daily Mail recently reported that the council was considering scraping a big screen that stands in the city centre and the previous day reported that a judge had made a ‘decision in principal’. A number of journalists appear to believe that the past tense of the verb to lead is lead rather than led.
Lord Norton: At least they are making those mistakes by actually creating content. Too much of the press is copy and paste from: PR/Advert press releases masquerading as news, collation/aggregation sites or straight of the web or blogs – with insufficient effort to verify the accuracy of the information.
My personal irritant is the almost ubiquitous use of the present tense for events that haven’t happened yet. This is commonplace on the morning news for government announcements or speeches later in the day.
tobedwithatrollope: As learning countries and capitals is no longer important in geography GCSE/AL exams you could have been reading the work of former ‘A’ Grade students! Perhaps like many universities the civil service needs a remedial course in the first year! (I’ve never heard of remedial politics, though in the real work it’s probably the definition of ‘opposition’!)
Croft: Copy-and-paste journalism is a problem that I’m afraid is growing worse all the time. A year or so ago, I was editing press releases for a major research library of international repute, and in one instance I discovered to my horror that all of the informational background text included in the press release had been copied and pasted, wholesale, from Wikipedia. I brought it to my supervisor’s attention, but there was nothing we could do except mark it up for spelling and grammar errors and pass it back to the client. Quite possibly the work of an ‘A’ Grade student, even!
Lord Norton: Sub-editors are indeed being shed across the board, or are being asked to take on more work at the cost of quality editing. Most people seem to imagine that running spell-check will suffice — but if I had 50p for every time I’ve seen the letter ‘l’ left out of the word ‘public’ (with the usual amusing consequences), I could put down my red pencil now and retire in comfort!
tobedwithatrollope: Wikipedia has it’s value but the reader does, depending on the importance of the use, need an increasing level of expertise/knowledge to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.
Spell checkers might be dangerous but auto-correct is the spawn of Satan!
😉
Thinking of punctuation, having read Lord Norton’s ‘1922 Committee’ piece is there an implied exclamation mark after the line ‘the Chief Whip…offered his assistance and that of his colleagues.’
From what I gather from the Media podcasts I listen to[1] lots of papers are shedding sub editors and, even worse, are outsourcing the sub editing to other companies (including ones based in other countries).
[1] If you’re interested they are: BBC Radio 4’s Media Show, The Guardian’s Media Talk, Radio New Zealand’s Mediawatch, ABC Radio National’s Media Report and NPR’s On The Media.
Thanks for the further comments, which rather confirm my worst fears. A combination of cost-cutting (getting rid of sub-editors), what appear to be falling standards in spelling and grammar, and over-reliance on a spell-check have resulted in some poor pretty dreadful, and sometimes frequent, errors.
Croft: I agree with you about auto-correct. On my piece on the history of the 1922 Committee, I am not sure an exclamation mark would have been appropriate. It was something of a case of pleasant surprise – half an exclamation mark perhaps!
tobedwithatrollope: On the omission of ‘l’ from public, I have personal experience. When I was chairman of governing body of my old school, I prepared an annual report which included details of public examinations – except the ‘l’ disappeared. This was in the days before the use of PCs and spell-checks. The draft was sent to all of my fellow governors – all seventeen of them. Not one spotted the error. It was only when the school office was about to print and circulate copies that someone noticed.
Brilliant stuff.
Rather reminds me of a fellow pupil in his mock GCSE French oral exam, who wanted to say that he had eaten jam on toast that morning, but thought that the French for ‘jam’ was ‘preservatif’! 🙂