>the ACT is wrong
Sounds fine by me. Pillars of education need to be kept in their place as followers not leaders! By the way what is ACT?
That wasn't meant to be as rude as it sounded - I went to UCL which you may not have heard of either.
I do find the idea of alternating his/her supremely silly. Its only the kind of idea that only an academic could come up with as a solution. Do people use him/her alternately in normal speech - hardly. I occasionally use "one" and always sound as if I've stepped off the ark. Whole sections of the community may well have never heard the term "one"!
A message for your tutors - get real! It might lose you a few marks but then surely education is about formulating arguments not just lamely accepting an arbitrary ruling. You can tell that I'm a child of the sixties, just wasn't made for conforming!
Footnote: I've now looked up the ACT. It looks like it is a college entrance examination. In which case I can see that an exam which is open to a wide range of people tends to lag current thinking, otherwise they would never be able to set a standard. I always found this to be a problem of school-level English language. It was always taught as if there were absolute rules. The better student was often marked down for failing to conform to the average. There is an earlier discussion of times when we felt that teachers had misunderstood our contributions. The simple answer is stick to mathematics. 1=1, 2=2,
