Devoted Reader Jim sends along a tip which he calls "tailor-made for N2P." It's filed under the "Can't Possibly Be True" section of "News of the Weird," and I can see why.
Official guidelines issued in May by Britain's Joint Council on Qualifications, directed to agencies that administer high school and junior-high standardized tests, call for students to receive extra points on the test if they have experienced pre-exam stress due to selected circumstances: death of a parent or close relative (up to 5 percent extra), death of other relative (up to 4 percent), death of pet (2 percent if on exam day, 1 percent if the day before), witnessing a distressing event on exam day (up to 3 percent), just-broken arm or leg (up to 3 percent), headache (1 percent).
The JCQ site, which is rather precious in a British sort of way, has a page listing the various documents of official guidelines. I couldn't find anything related to this on there, nor could I find it in the press releases. Of course, I haven't had time to wade through everything.
If true, however, the JCQ has just handed students a loophole the size of Lake Michigan. They might as well give everyone 1% off the top, to ward off the deluge of headache claims. And if they're really interested in cutting students a break, I'd say a 5% gimme isn't quite enough for someone who became an orphan two days before the exam.
But then there's "witnessing a distressing event on exam day." The heck? Distress, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, so the JCQ will be hard-pressed to prove that something really didn't distress examinees. For example, this morning, driving to work, I saw a woman wearing skin-tight denim shorts who should not have been wearing anything skin-tight, denim, or short. The vision was that of a normal-sized female torso perched across a blue-jeaned billboard. I'd swear on a Bible that that sight was distressing. If the shorts had had writing on the bum, even more so.
Posted by kswygert at June 7, 2005 10:04 AM