Mark Goldblatt of NRO proposes an English exit exam:
1) Define the terms "independent clause" and "dependent clause."2) Find the subject in the following sentence: "Many of my friends drive to school."
3) What are the three principal parts of the verb "to bite"?
4) "Jane has been dating John for two years." Is that sentence written in a present tense or a past tense?
5) "Jane has been dating John for two years." Change that sentence to the corresponding past tense.
6) What three parts of speech can an adverb modify?
7) What is the main use of a semi-colon?
8) "Jane invited John and me." "Jane invited John and I." Which is correct?
9) "He should of told me that I wasn't invited." What's the error in that sentence?
10) "Every person is entitled to their own opinion." What's the error in that sentence?
His amusing take on why such an exam is necessary:
Each question is worth ten points. If you scored below 70, you failed. More to the point, your teachers failed. They've failed you, miserably, for twelve years. Those hundreds of hours spent in classrooms with posters of William Shakespeare and Alice Walker on the walls, those hundreds of hours spent as your teachers prattled on about the joys of creative writing — those hours are worthless, utterly worthless, and you can't have them back. Those A's you received for free-verse poems, those stories you wrote to explore your feelings, those papers returned to you without a single grammatical correction — they're worthless too. You didn't learn what you should have learned, what you needed to learn.
Expect snitty rebuttals from touchy-feely educators to appear soon.
Posted by kswygert at May 9, 2005 12:13 PM