I'm spending my weekend marking exams and papers. As always, I have to decide, "Should I take off marks for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors?"
Grades are a measure of a student's abilities, skills, and knowledge. They are used by admission committees in deciding a student's potential for graduate work (a master's degree, or law school), and by employers, who may use grades in making hiring decisions.
So the question, "Should spelling and grammar count?" is asking what skills an economics professor should be measuring.
Should a professor attempt to measure a student's knowledge of economics, for example, his or her ability to explain and apply the first theorem of welfare economics? If the purpose of undergraduate grades is to assess a student's potential for graduate work in economics, say, then knowledge of economics should be the key grading criterion. Spelling and grammar shouldn't matter, except in so far as an extremely poor command over English will make it difficult for a student to present a coherent explanation of economic phenomena.
Or should a professor attempt to measure whether or not a student has the skills demanded by employers? Employers want to hire people who are capable of writing a business letter or sending an error-free email. From an employer's point of view, spelling and grammar do count.
As a practical matter, I usually don't take off marks for spelling and grammar, as long as it seems that the student has made some kind of an effort. First, taking off marks for spelling and grammar would disadvantage students who do not speak English as their first language, and this seems almost like a form of discrimination (though the spelling and grammar of native speakers is far from perfect).
Second, it seems unfair to take off marks for spelling and grammar when I am not teaching the students anything about spelling and grammar. Grades, it seems to me, should assess what the student has learned in the course, not what the student knew to begin with. (Carleton, like other universities, does have a writing tutorial centre, but the centre tends to focus on university-level writing skills, for example, how to structure an essay. English as a Second Language courses are offered at the university, but that isn't much help the day before a major paper is due.)
So, other than expecting essays to be spell-checked and in paragraph form, I generally don't subtract grades for grammatical errors.
But I have no idea if this is general practice, or indeed if this is the right thing to be doing.
And now, back to marking…
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
“Hiring is a matter of reducing a pile of 300 resumes to a pile of 3 resumes”
More often than not in the SME sector hires are made through internal networks, not through resume paring. Heck if you’re a welder I could care less if you can’t write at a fifth grade level, let alone speak the language; I would look for getting a good bead going and not smoking too much weed over lunch!
If you’re a foreman in charge of reading through contracts, you better understand what a comma, semicolon, colon, m-dash and n-dash are because they tend to be somewhat important. If you’re going to be in charge of any sort of leverage at a company grammar tends to be important, even in technical circles oft maligned by pendants for poor spelling.
You’ve all probably seen this one —
A Little Poem Regarding Computer Spell Checkers…
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
It seems that spelling and grammar could be the least of your worries:
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/244748/20111107/cheating-ucsd-pre-med-california-surveys.htm
Oy.
I guess there are two things to take away from that story.
First, it’s interesting that students (reportedly, at least) respond to incentives. If they think cheating will be punished, they wouldn’t do it. Apart from the obvious suggestion – that UC San Diego should, figuratively, execute the odd cheater “pour encourager les autres” – I wonder if students wouldn’t respond the same way if they thought that poor grammar and spelling would be punished.
Second, this suggests that the secret to solving the grammar and spelling crisis amongst university students is not to teach them english grammar and spelling, but rather to ask the english department to give some remedial english lessons at the local essay mill. Sure, it defeats the purpose, but at least it’ll make your job easier.
I write fairly well. Poorly by the standards of skilled writers in the arts, but efficiently and functionally by the standards of the sciences or a professional in a technical field. And I would never mistake “there” for “their.” But my fingers do. Sometimes, as my mind rushes to the next sentence before I have completed transcription of the previous, a homonym error will appear. It seems I have no conscious awareness of the individual letters or even words as they are typed. For me the mental process appears to be an oral Internal dictation to a mental secretary who, while aware of the rules of English spelling, is apparently ignorant of meaning or grammar. I’d imagine I’m not the only one with this particular faulty writing process.
I don’t think spelling is too important as long as student eventually corrects it. A subsequent spelling test of wrong words is ideal but docking subsequent paper mispellinertia, works. Grammar on the other hand is very important. It breaks up your thoughts and affects weighting too. It is probably, along with living dictionary, why our language is so superior, at least for business.
Ideally, any student attending university should have a strong grasp of the spelling & grammar in their native language. The universities’ role in this regard should be limited to assisting non-native speakers; for non-native speakers, the benefits of having their spelling & grammar corrected by highly educated speakers are obvious.
Of course, we don’t live in that ideal, since most high schools and elementary schools are atrocious, while the expanding intake of universities means that more and more inadequately taught students are going to university. Perhaps it will get to the point where universities have to expand undergraduate degrees to 5 years for most students, so they can give them a one-year crash course in the basic skills of numeracy & literacy that they should have learnt at high school.
“What does it do to a child to tell her that the speech of her family and friends is wrong, that it indicates ignorance or stupidity? Wouldn’t you reject that implication? Wouldn’t you resist such teaching?”
Nope. I’d say that it’s one of the most valuable lessons one can learn at school and the sooner it is learnt, the better.
I’ve benefited tremendously from being able to speak standard English. A considerable proportion of the people who know me, who aren’t native speakers or who are very unfamiliar with my regional accent, wouldn’t be able to understand me if I spoke with a strong regional accent. I don’t see why my wings should be clipped to protect my feelings.
A one-year crash course wouldn’t do much.
It is not that the public schools don’t attempt to teach children spelling and grammar. They do. The problem is that they fail.
English spelling and grammar are a collection of illogical, confusing, and horribly inconsistent rules. The motivation for children to learn them is nearly nonexistent. Before you snark at public school teachers, find a 13-year-old who can’t write and isn’t particularly interested. Try to teach him (and it is, usually, a ‘him’) to write. Just try. It’s harder than you think.
About the only kids who do learn it successfully are nerd types like me who spent most of their childhoods reading and very little out of doors. It’s the exposure to a vast quantity of copy-edited reading material that turns the trick. Most kids simply aren’t interested in that and never have been.
In grade 11, my English class was assigned to read Orwell’s 1984. Probably a quarter or more of the class literally could not read the book at all. They would look at the words on the page, and it made no more sense to them than had it been written in Latin. Another quarter trudged through, taking as long as ten minutes to read a single page. This was in a small town where all the kids were native English speakers.
On that note, in fact, my experience has been that immigrant students usually have better English spelling and grammar than native speakers do. They simply have a lot more motivation to learn English than do native speakers.
tyronen,
A year is all it takes. I only had one year in all of high school during which I was actually formally taught English grammar, spelling & vocab. Then again, we also had the benefit of studying French grammar for four years and after a foreign language’s grammar English was easy. We were also the Higher class, i.e. the thirty or so pupils who were actually interested and able to handle English studies.
It is true that motivation is important. It is impossible to teach a language to a class that isn’t fully committed. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the decline of the learning of foreign languages in Britain (and the near extinction of high school Latin) corresponds well with the decline in corporal punishment & selective education.
If the year was required for further study, I think it would go well. When learning a foreign language was a requisite of studying at university in the UK, people managed just fine.
How did they teach literacy in your town? I.e. phonetics, whole-language etc.?
Most of what I know about grammar, I learned in French. Even now, the names of the different verb tenses are French in my mind, like l’impératif or l’imparfait. And my French grammar and spelling as a non-fluent anglophone was better than that of the students from the french immersion elementary school that fed into my english high school. Something is really backwards about not teaching grammar to students in their native language. It makes understanding and learning languages easier when you understand and can conceptualize the mechanics.
Oh, and on student petitions. I always thought this was really classless. It usually amounted to bullying the professor, TA, etc. to do something they did not think was appropriate in their professional opinion. If you have a gripe, bring it to the person in question. But bringing a petition to adjust the grade on the midterm of whatever–just classless.
K, I have had the same experience (e.g., finger mis-typing the wrong version of their/there), and also consider myself a careful speller/writer. But these homophone substitutions have been happening to me more and more frequently recently. I think it is the constant barrage of un-copy-edited text, found in blogs and comments over the last several years, that makes a person numb to the mistakes that used to make our teeth itch. Or somehow the vocabulary section of our brain has noted the occasional substitution, over many thousands of occurrences of a word, and then comes out with the same substitution itself, directly to the typing fingers, without clearing it with the brain first. E.g., if 5% of occurrences of “Its” that you read are actually spelled “It’s”, then maybe 5% of the time, when your brain has requested an “Its” from the warehouse, an “It’s” is shipped instead.
Determinant:
”
Linking verb? Nope, just plain illogical. “It is I” or “It was he” throws the sentence into the passive rather than the active voice.
”
Not at all. The ‘subject->linking verb->complement’ pattern in which the subject and the complement(or predicate nominative) both require the nominative case is common in quite a few of the Indo-European languages. There is no passivity connotation in the above.
The pattern exists for example in Latin, Greek, Hindi, modern German, modern Russian, etc, etc. French is a bit peculiar in this respect (one would expect the predicate nominative would be inherited from Latin, but it was lost although the remnants of the PN can be found in some Old French texts).
So, what you see in the modern English is a competition between the traditional/archaic predicate nominative as in ‘It is I’ and its modern substitute, an objective pronoun, as in ‘It’s me’. The choice is yours 🙂
”
Again, it’s a case of rulemakers ignoring the role of voice and declension
”
Voice has got nothing to do with that altough declension, or more specifically the case of a noun, does.
There is no rule making here — the pattern had been quite natural in the majority of the Indo-European languages for millenia.
The verb here is not a weak linking or auxiliary verb, it is a strong, active act of identification. Again, it’s a case of rulemakers ignoring the role of voice and declension.
Moi: “What does it do to a child to tell her that the speech of her family and friends is wrong, that it indicates ignorance or stupidity? Wouldn’t you reject that implication? Wouldn’t you resist such teaching?”
W. Peden: “Nope. I’d say that it’s one of the most valuable lessons one can learn at school and the sooner it is learnt, the better.”
Learning that you parents, neighbors, and friends are ignorant or stupid is a valuable lesson?
W. Peden: “I’ve benefited tremendously from being able to speak standard English.”
I think that we are talking about two different things. You seem to talking about the benefits of learning the standard dialect. I am talking about how it has been taught. 🙂
W. Peden: “Ideally, any student attending university should have a strong grasp of the spelling & grammar in their native language. The universities’ role in this regard should be limited to assisting non-native speakers; for non-native speakers, the benefits of having their spelling & grammar corrected by highly educated speakers are obvious.”
Change “language” to “dialect” and we are on the same page. 🙂
W. Peden: “Of course, we don’t live in that ideal, since most high schools and elementary schools are atrocious, while the expanding intake of universities means that more and more inadequately taught students are going to university. Perhaps it will get to the point where universities have to expand undergraduate degrees to 5 years for most students, so they can give them a one-year crash course in the basic skills of numeracy & literacy that they should have learnt at high school.”
IMO, innumeracy is even worse, although that is probably not much of a problem in economics, because of self-selection.
Min:” IMO, innumeracy is even worse, although that is probably not much of a problem in economics, because of self-selection. ”
You mean self-slected like the guy who plaintively said from the back of the class ,once when I was at the blackboard writing GDP= C+I+G+X-M, “Sir, you can’t add letters, only numbers…”
And if I only could reproduce the sound of his despairing voice…
Min,
“Learning that you parents, neighbors, and friends are ignorant or stupid is a valuable lesson?”
I thought the lesson was supposed to be that non-standard English is an indicator of these things, rather than sufficient proof?
“IMO, innumeracy is even worse, although that is probably not much of a problem in economics, because of self-selection.”
Quite possibly.
“Change “language” to “dialect” and we are on the same page. :)”
I don’t think someone should have to go to university to learn their native language.
“I think that we are talking about two different things. You seem to talking about the benefits of learning the standard dialect. I am talking about how it has been taught. :)”
Ideally, regional dialects wouldn’t be looked down upon and teachers could truthfully teach children that their dialects are particular things about their culture (like wearing kilts or eating waffles) & the standard dialect would be a layer on top of that which expands horizons, like learning Latin in the Middle Ages. In practice, any teacher that doesn’t convey the fact that speaking in a regional dialect can be a social impediment is irresponsible.
Moi: “Change “language” to “dialect” and we are on the same page. :)”
W. Peden: “I don’t think someone should have to go to university to learn their native language.”
Well, as my linguistics prof said, there are five dialects of late Latin: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Rumanian.
W. Peden: “In practice, any teacher that doesn’t convey the fact that speaking in a regional dialect can be a social impediment is irresponsible.”
And one who makes it an impediment is worse.
Min,
Where I was brought up, in England, thee, and thou were commonly used. When I came to study French in Grammar school, I saw that the usage was similar to Tu and Vous.
Min,
“there are five dialects of late Latin”
That’s odd. Was not your linguistics prof aware of the other 42 “dialects of late Latin” ?
”
And one who makes it an impediment is worse.
”
Between the two of you, W. Peden seems to have a much better grasp of reality.
Not endorsing the phenomenon of course.
vjk: “Between the two of you, W. Peden seems to have a much better grasp of reality.”
I am arguing against a particular view of reality, pointing out a different way of looking at things. 🙂
@vjk: OK, you have smoked me out. 😉
W. Peden: “Ideally, any student attending university should have a strong grasp of the spelling & grammar in their native language.”
IIUC, when it comes to native speakers, W. Peden means that they should have a strong grasp of the standard dialect. He seems to think that I disagree. Here is what I think:
Ideally, any student attending middle school who is a native speaker should be fluent in the standard dialect of the native language. I. e., if they speak a non-standard dialect, they should learn the standard dialect in, ahem, grammar school. 🙂
Now, that does not happen, for a variety of reasons, and so we get the problems that we do. And you do not have to shame students, or tell them that their habitual speech is incorrect, in order to teach them the standard dialect.
Why so young? Well, learning a second language or dialect is different (for most people) than learning your native tongue. You use different areas of the brain that are less specialized for language. The brain becomes less plastic as we age, and rapidly so before age 11.
Maybe a small amount on some projects, I think. I remember taking one course (in my second language) where 30% of the mark for the major term project was allocated to grammar. So, given that I didn’t particularly like the way the course was taught, I engaged in an instance of rationality and dropped the course.
I would think something like 10% on writing-heavy projects for “style”. This would let you formally recognize good organization and clear writing in addition to technically correct work, and would be a good way to wield a very small stick to encourage people to try to get the correct formulations when describing statistical methods or results. (This is something I’m well attuned to, as looking out for such issues is no small part of what I do when editing a paper.) That is, so long as you’re very clear about where this 10% goes.
However, it would be somewhat unfair in some senses to the foreign students.
Perhaps you could give them a chance to rewrite, but then you’d have to decide if you want to be a language teacher as well. In my language teaching days I used to allow unlimited opportunities to rewrite stuff, but few students took the time to do so. Hard to say whether the same will apply at the university level, and whether you figure it’s worth your (or their) time. I would consider giving them back the points straight away of they bothered with the second effort.
My $0.02