Monday, May 30, 2011

Examim*, etc. (for Examin*)

To those who have to take them, I hope you pass your exams with flying colors. End-of-year examinations have long been a rite of passage for bleary-eyed, sweaty-palmed, No. 2 pencil-wielding students (and they're no bed of roses for the teachers, tutors, proctors, and graders, either). Some reports suggest that there's been too much "teaching to the test" lately, but SAT scores and the like do tend to fluctuate and nobody's exactly sure why. The first SAT, which now apparently (if a tad unreasonably?) stands for the "SAT Reasoning Test," was administered in 1926, when it was called the "Scholastic Aptitude Test" (which, to be honest with you, I thought it was still called, although I'm really not as old as all that). Examim* was found six times in OhioLINK (once with a [sic] and once with the antiquated bracketed bang [!]) and 70 times in WorldCat. We also got one hit on Exanima* and two on Exanin* (55 and 31, respectively, in WorldCat). Find as many of today's typo as you can in the allotted time, and don't forget, spelling counts!

(The Examination Schools, or exam halls, at Oxford, 2005, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

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