British Teens Awarded For Cussing on Standardized Tests

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I went to a fairly progressive high school, but even there students were not encouraged to use expletives on standardized tests. Not so in England however, where 14-16 year-olds sitting for their GCSE exams (General Certificate of Secondary Education, formerly the "O" levels) are actually awarded points for cursing, as long as their usage is correct.

In one of the more egregious examples, a 2006 English exam question asked students to "Describe the room you're sitting in." One delightfully creative and succinct response came back with "F--- off." Chief examiner Peter Buckroyd graded the paper with a score of 2 out of 27. Buckroyd, who is responsible for examination standards and training, explained to The Times that it would have been "wicked" to score the essay a zero because "it does show some very basic skills we are looking for — like conveying some meaning and some spelling... It's better than someone that doesn't write anything at all."

Now, had the student put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, he or she (I'm guessing he's a he) would have fared even better, as that punctuation "would have been showing a little bit [more] skill." In order to gain minimum marks in English, student must only demonstrate "some simple sequencing of ideas" and "some words in appropriate order," regardless of how profanely they do so.

But such extraordinary grading seems not to have made it across the pond. When I asked one SAT tutor who teaches for the new essay portion of our standardized test what would happen if an American student were to write a similar essay, he told me simply, "It would not be good."

Photo by Jennifer Domenick for the Washington Post