In the first part of this series, I suggested that many strategies taught by test-preparation companies cannot legitimately be called gaming the SAT. Which is not to say that there aren't strategies out there that do amount to gaming the test. But many test-prep people, including myself, take the line that actual improvement comes from building fundamental skills and takes real work. (The test-prep guy writing in the Times debate I mentioned last time takes this attitude.)

About 15 years ago, when I was still in grad school, I went through a phase where I did a certain amount of translation into Old English--perhaps a masochistic exercise, but it appealed to me as a technical challenge and as a way of improving my knowledge of the language. It would also come in handy when, years later, I got a job translating stuff for the Zemeckis version of Beowulf.

You probably know about the visualization trick for learning new words: create a mnemonic device linking the sound of the word to its meaning. For example, to learn hirsute, you might picture a woman standing in a business suit. The suit has hairs poking out of it all over. You then tell yourself, "Her suit is hairy."

In December, the New York Times had a "Room for Debate" piece called Why Does the SAT Endure? The viewpoints expressed include those of two psychometricians, a college admissions officer, someone working for a test-prep company, and an education policy wonk. Taken together, the pieces didn't constitute much of a debate, but the introduction to the discussion poses the question of why the SAT is still around if, as its critics say, it can be gamed.

Standardized tests in general, and the SAT in particular, get a lot of bad press. Companies like Princeton Review build their entire marketing strategy on trash talk about how horrible the test is. Organizations like Fair Test campaign for abandoning the use of the SAT (and the ACT) in college admissions, claiming that it is both biased and ineffective.

but I am starting to blog again. Look for more regular posts soon.

This morning's google news served up a nice crash blossom, courtesy of the Times Daily:

"Racist language bill passes"

When I first saw the headline, I thought it was an editorial inveighing against some bill about language that happened to be racist, rather than a bill about racist language, which, on reading the article, I find to be the intended interpretation.

On March 28, 1990 Michael Jordan scored 69 points against Cleveland. After the game, his teammate Stacey King quipped, "I'll always remember this as the night that Michael and I combined for 70 points."

The issue of the Oxford comma has come up several times at Language Log, with some very amusing examples of the consequences of omitting the comma before and. See this magazine cover, the October 2010 issue of Tails, isn't just missing the final comma but all the commas in the series.

It reads (linebreaks original),

EAT,
RAY,
LOVE

For those interested in Old English or Anglo-Saxon culture, a fantastic resource has just been released: the Woruldhord Project. There is a lot of interesting stuff there, especially if you're teaching Old English. I found the Oxford English Faculty Exam papers particularly interesting. They illustrate the rigorous philological focus that once was the norm in the field but which now has been supplanted by other concerns.