You would think that a standardized test put together by a
committee of 30 state teachers and tested in 50 high schools would be pretty
accurate.
Well, you'd be wrong.
Geoffrey Stanford, a 17-year-old junior at Wichita East High
School, spotted an error after the test had been in use for almost a year.
The mistake? In a section about greenhouse gases, the word
"omission" was used in place of the word "emission."
Karla Denny, spokeswoman for the Education Department of
Kansas, said, "You hate for that sort of thing to happen, but it happens.
"We're human."
We've all been guilty of relying a little too heavily on
spellcheck to edit our work, but this is a standardized test. It has to be
perfect. If the questions don't make sense, how effective can the test be?
Stanford describes himself as "a stickler for grammar
and vocabulary and the correct use of words."
It's nice to know that even if the Kansas Education
Department can't be bothered to thoroughly read their standardized tests, at
least one of their students can.
"It annoys me when I see mistakes," Stanford said.
Probably not as much as it annoys the Kansas Education Department.
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