A for Exceptable

College administrators are scratching their heads trying to figure our how the straight-A students they accepted tanked on the SATs. “The University of California system, for instance, reported a 15-point drop in applicants’ scores but no corresponding dips in other measures of their quality, such as class rank and grade-point average,” Eric Hoover reports in the September 8th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “At La Salle University in Philadelphia, SAT scores fell an average of 15 points for applicants and about 10 points for admitted students even though officials had not altered their admissions strategies.”

“Robert G. Voss, La Salle’s dean of admission and financial aid, said he felt better about the unexpected decline in SAT scores at his own institution after seeing the national data last week.” Unfortunately, his heightened self-esteem will do nothing to reverse the effects of the 12 years of education that most students receive in public schools.

Though imperfect, the SAT measures verbal and mathematical aptitude. So do the literacy surveys compiled by the Department of Education that display the same downward spiral in grammatical and computational ability.

And now, some of the professors who have to work with students saddled with this inadequate training are starting to speak out more frequently. “I came in on the first wave of spell-check utilities,’ English professor Ben Yagoda writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “They lull students and others into a false sense of security, leaving homonyms or near homonyms of the intended word unmarked.”

“Cataloging this kind of mistake can be great sport; I treasure the article about a board-of-education meeting that mentioned the ‘Super Attendant of Schools,’ and the one on drug problems that referred to a ‘heroine attic.’”

Yagoda, who teaches at the University of Delaware, is the author of the forthcoming book, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse. “If you stare at such mistakes long enough, some of these actually seem to make sense, as in ‘The storm wrecked [as opposed to wreaked] havoc,’” Yagoda writes. “And some such errors are so inviting that they now outnumber correct usages, at least in my students’ work.”

“I expect to read that something peaked (rather than piqued) the interest, that a person poured (rather than pored) over a book, that an action lead (rather than led) to negative consequences.” Yagoda’s article on “The Seven Deadly Sins of Student Writers” appeared in the September 8th Chronicle Review.

Not too surprisingly he points to public education as the primary reason for the widespread commission of these sins. “The cultural trends that have led to the unmagnificent seven?,” he asks. “The de-emphasis on grammar rules in primary and secondary education has to be a factor, as does the shocking shoddiness with which many students go about their work.”

“That is, if they spent more than a few minutes proofreading their efforts, or thought to consult the dictionary when in doubt about a word, they would catch many or most of their errors.” Along with the lack of training and poor preparation, Yagoda points to the lost art of reading as a reason why students are not prepared to write at college-level.

“Once upon a time, reading was a popular pastime, at least among the portion of the population that went to college,” he concludes. “Until and unless it becomes such again, I’m resigned to making the same corrections on the same mistakes, over and over, until I put away my red pen for good.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.