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The Grumpy Grammarian

The Curmudgeon is back in class and grumpier than ever.  On the first night in English 101, I give my students a diagnostic quiz called "What Do You Know," which is my devious – and effective – way of proving to them that they don't know what they don't know.  There's no pressure.  It is, after all, their first class, and I haven't had a chance to teach them anything yet; thus, I make it clear that, though I want them to try as hard as they can to give the right answers, the quiz won't count.

Before revealing the findings on this diagnostic exercise, let me introduce the cast of characters.  They are, I believe, a typical community college night class.  Several are in their late teens, many are in their twenties, and a few are older students who have been out of school for a while.  More than half are pursuing "terminal" degrees in specialized programs (nursing, information technology, law enforcement, and the like), but many are planning to complete their studies at a four-year college.  They may be starting in a two-year community college because they cannot afford to go to a four-year college yet.  Since this is an evening class, nearly everyone has a full-time job while attending school.  Only a couple are non-native speakers because we have special composition sections for "international" students.  Every student in the class has a high school diploma (or, occasionally, a GED).  All have passed standardized English and reading admissions tests or, if they did not, have taken and passed fhe college's "developmental" (remedial) classes in English, reading, or both.

> Our first finding reveals that these people are "normal," by our society's standards.  They are inexplicably as incapable of distinguishing between its and it's as most of the population seems to be.  In the sentence The dog is wagging its / its' / it's tail, 14 of the 25 students who took the quiz chose the wrong word.  I didn't tally how many chose the nonexistent its', but I recall that one or two did.  The rest of those giving wrong answers assumed that it's must be the right word.  They did better on This shows that its / its' / it's happy.  Only 4 failed to select the correct word, the contraction it's.  However, since these two sentences were back to back and many must have chosen it's in both of them, it's evident that they do not know the distinction between the two.  This is reassuring, as I have suggested, only if one is looking for normalcy; my students are as normally clueless as the general population.

> A second finding concerns the words then and than.  Here I played a dirty trick by giving them two consecutive sentences in which than was the correct choice:  It is much better to be happy then / than to be rich and Money can bring more trouble then / than we realize.  Seven students selected then in the first sentence; nine selected then in the second sentence.  It's comforting to know that a majority either know the difference or are good guessers.  It's not comforting to surmise that they don't know why.

> It was also comforting to find out that 21 of the 25 students knew enough to select their in Our neighbors have left on there / they're / their vacation.  I should note, however, that my joy at discovering such brilliance has been short-lived because more than a third of the class got there and their mixed up in their in-class essays the next week.

> The next finding reveals that they did indeed learn something in school.  Unfortunately, what they learned is wrong.  Asked to label the statement, "It is not correct to begin a sentence with Because," true or false, 19 students said it was true (only 6 said it was false).  Because they have been taught this in school, they think it is true.  Twelve also said that "It is always wrong to end a sentence with a preposition" is true.  I wonder where they're coming from.  I also wonder what they've been up to.

> The answers on the last true-false question suggests that some of my students may be hoping that technology will compensate for their ignorance.  Seven students labeled as "True" the statement:  "A spell-check will detect any wrong words in what we have written."  This may help to explain why some have trouble with it's / its and then / than, for spell-check will accept either word in any context.

> Although only four students missed the next question, I am distressed that anyone would get it wrong.  In "I have never understood the logic of english/English," these four chose the uncapitalized word. 

Questions became a bit tougher after this point because until now random guesses on two-thirds of the questions had a 50-50 chance of being right (only two choices), and the others had a 33% random chance of being right (three choices).  In the last group, the odds of getting the right answer by a random guess were 1 in 4 or even more because these were multiple-choice questions usually containing four choices (one had 5 choices, and another had 6).

> My students should not visit the casinos at Atlantic City.  Against all odds, only three students got this one right (22 got it wrong) – "A rule of grammar states that:  (a) Subjects and verbs must agree in number; (b) Subjects and verbs must agree in gender; (c) Subjects and verbs must agree in tense; (d) All of the above."  Seventeen students thought that the right answer was "All of the above"; five thought that subjects and verbs needed to agree in tense (c).

When I returned the quiz, I must say that they were hard-pressed to tell me whether the noun desk was in the past, present, or future tense.  They had an even harder time figuring out whether the verbs go and is are masculine, feminine, or neuter.  Anyone who wonders how so many could have answered "All of the above" needs to realize that, despite twelve years of English classes, many of these students don't know what nouns and verbs are, much less what the grammatical terms number, gender, and tense mean.

> Since they lack this background and also suffer from defective logic circuits, 15 students were unable to correctly identify the subject in this sentence:  Writing essays in English class is difficult.  Eleven said that the subject is essays.  "Indeed," I asked them later, "Essays IS difficult?"  Two students said that the subject was difficult, one thought it was class, and one (good grief!) identified is as the subject.

> They did as poorly at identifying the grammatical subject of an inverted sentence:  Among my many friends is a graduate professor with three doctorate degrees.  Only 9 students were able to correctly identify professor as the subject.  Most of the 16 who gave a wrong answer selected friends (7) or many friends (4).  (Indeed . . . "friends IS?")  Three chose degrees (no knowledge of prepositional phrases here).  Two – this is scary – selected Among.  I didn't check whether one of them was the same person who thought is was the subject of the previous sentence.  (Maybe these two follow the principle that, if you haven't a clue what the subject is, pick the first word in the sentence.)

> A glimmer of hope emerged with a series of four sentences where students had to choose among "Mary and me / Mary and I / Mary and myself / Me and Mary will be going to New York."  One selected Mary and me, and one chose Mary and myself, but everyone else correctly identified Mary and I as the right option.  However, hopes were dashed with the next set involving choice of pronoun:  "(a) Please send the check to Mr. Jones or me; (b) Please send the check to Mr. Jones or I; (c) Please send the check to Mr. Jones or myself; (d) Please send the check to myself or Mr. Jones."  Although I doubt that any of my students would ever say, "Send the check to myself," 17 students opted for ine of the sentences using myself.  Twelve chose c, and 5 chose d.  It never occurred to any of them that, since these two versions are grammatically identical (only with the two objects of the preposition switched), it is not logically possible for one of these to be right and the other wrong.

The class average on this little diagnostic quiz was 56%.  Individual scores ranged from a high of 90% to a low of 30%.  Only two students scored at or above a passing percentage of 70% (90% and 75%).

After they had completed the quiz (but before I scored it), I asked them to rate it as "very hard," "hard," "easy," or "very easy."  Nobody – not even low scorers – rated it as "very hard," and nobody rated it as "very easy" either.  However, despite the low class average, 16 students said it was "easy."  Only 6 said it was "hard" (and 4 of them, including the two passing scores, were in the top third of the class).  The worse the scores, the more likely they were to say the quiz was "easy" – except for the poor fellow who scored 30%.  He admitted to finding it hard.  [Three students didn't bother to rate it.] 

Mission accomplished:  My students found out that they don't know what they don't know.  It's not particularly shocking for me to see such ignorance of basic English (I've been doing this for a long time), but it is still more than a little disturbing to see how blissfully unaware students have been of what they don't know.  I'm sorry to have to give this news to the high schools, but my little quiz seriously dented the self-esteem that you have been trying so hard to have students develop.  Perhaps you could focus less on false ego-building and more on imparting some basic knowledge of how to use their native language correctly.

Footnote:  Some people may contend that purely academic tests such as this bear little relationship to students' ability to express themselves in writing.  I disagree.  While it is true that correctness in grammar and usage does not, in itself, create effective writing, there is a positive correlation between how students perform on a quiz such as this and how clearly and coherently they write.  Yes, exceptions do exist.  Some students seem to write well almost intuitively but do not do well on objective tests covering grammar and usage.  However, such students are rare.  On the other hand, students whose writing is muddled (even disregarding the basic grammatical errors) always do poorly on quizzes such as this.