Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Gee, I wonder why.

From the April 4 New York Times:
About a third of the nation’s eighth-grade students, and roughly a quarter of its high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to nationwide test results released Thursday. . . The results were released at the Library of Congress in Washington. The host, James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, drew laughs when he expressed concern about "the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought — the sentence," as young Americans do most of their writing in disjointed prose composed in Internet chat rooms or in cellphone text messages. "The sentence is the biggest casualty," Mr. Billington said.

"American students’ writing skills are deteriorating," said Will Fitzhugh, founder of The Concord Review, a journal that features history research papers written by high school students. . . “The only way to assess the kind of writing that students will have to do in college,” he said, “is to have them write a term paper, and then have somebody sit down and grade it. And nobody wants to do that, because it’s too costly.”
More here. And somehow they're all getting straight-A's...
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