June 02, 2002

stupidity on the New york regents exam

The Elderly Man and the Sea? Test Sanitizes Literary Texts (password required, but it's free to sign up)

"In a feat of literary sleuth work, Ms. Heifetz, the mother of a high school senior and a weaver from Brooklyn, inspected 10 high school English exams from the past three years and discovered that the vast majority of the passages — drawn from the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anton Chekhov and William Maxwell, among others — had been sanitized of virtually any reference to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, alcohol, even the mildest profanity and just about anything that might offend someone for some reason. Students had to write essays and answer questions based on these doctored versions — versions that were clearly marked as the work of the widely known authors."

A clear example of the institutional stupidity of a bureaucracy.

Posted by Lee at June 2, 2002 10:31 AM
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