I will admit that I missed this one. I read the sentence in question three or four times without catching the problem. THIS is where parsing a sentence is invaluable!
Grammar Glitch Pushes PSAT to Rethink, Rescore
By Linda Perlstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 14, 2003; Page A01
"Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured." Is there something grammatically wrong with this sentence?
Educational Testing Service, which administers the PSAT for the College Board, said there wasn't. Kevin Keegan, a Montgomery County high school journalism teacher, said there was.
After three months of back-and-forth letter writing, complete with dueling references to English usage books, the testing firm sent the question, from the writing portion of the Oct. 15 exam, to an outside panel of experts. Keegan's point was valid, the grammarians said, forcing ETS to throw out the question and bump up the test scores of nearly 500,000 students, of the 1.8 million who took the test that day.
Each year the PSAT, through which high school juniors qualify to become National Merit commended students or semifinalists, generates 50 or so inquiries about test answers, but this is the first time in two decades that a challenge has succeeded, testing officials said.
On Question 10, students were asked to identify whether there was a grammatical error in the sentence, or none at all. The correct answer, as scored by ETS, was "E," for no error. Keegan, who teaches at James Hubert Blake High School in Silver Spring and coordinates Montgomery County's Quizmaster Challenge cable show, disagreed.
The word "her," he posited, was improperly referring to "Toni Morrison's," so the answer should have been "A," signifying a mistake in "her to create." Many grammar manuals insist that a pronoun such as "her" should refer only to a noun, not, as in the case of the possessive "Toni Morrison's," an adjective.
Before it wound up on the test, the question was reviewed by as many as 30 experts. Both then and after, "the staff felt there was one correct answer," said Lee Jones, a College Board vice president. Keegan agreed that there was one answer: the other one.
Keegan, 49, noticed the question while going over the returned test of a student. "I was taught that rule a long time ago -- 30 years ago -- and I have actually enforced it on people's essays," he said.
He submitted a complaint, and ETS responded in a letter that there is disagreement on that rule's validity. "The reader knows full well that her can only refer to Toni Morrison," an assessment specialist wrote.
That's not the point, Keegan wrote in response. The exam isn't testing whether sentences are clear but whether they are correct. Besides, he said later, "if you have a rule that in two grammar books contradicts itself, you either don't test it or you accept both answers."
In its next response, ETS said that 53 percent of test-takers, including the "most able," chose "no error" as their answer.
That's not the point either, Keegan wrote back.
After ETS conceded, the College Board this month sent a letter nationwide explaining that the question would be thrown out and the test rescored. PSAT questions all previously appeared on SAT tests, but the College Board is not going that far back to change scores. "It was so long ago that it seems that it would be kind of moot to do that," Jones said.
Keegan's success has given him some satisfaction -- oh, wait.
Keegan's success has given the teacher some satisfaction that students kept from National Merit status only because of their "A" answer may now make the cut.
However, he said of ETS administrators, "I'm still not happy with them."
ETS rescored the test without Question 10 and kept the higher of the two scores for each test-taker. The scores that increased did so by about one or two points, out of a possible 80. Because of the way the test was rescored, though, students who originally chose "E" had a slight point advantage; those who chose "A" wound up no better off than those who answered "B," "C" or "D" or skipped the question. Keegan finds this unjust.
Jones called it "the best and fairest solution we can come up with." Though, he added, "the best thing to do would be not to have had the question on the test."
