Students Failing Because of Poor Grammar

innocent_white_lamb writes "30% of freshman university students fail a 'simple English test' at Waterloo University (up from 25% a few years ago. Academic papers are riddled with 'cuz' (in place of 'because') and even include little emoticon faces. One professor says that students 'think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words.' At Simon Fraser University, 10% of students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses."

Comments

Re:Maybe its the school thats failing

[cybin]

IMHO, affixing some kind of rigid standard to spoken language is the lazy way -- computer code it not a good analogy. computer code has to be extremely semantically rigid so the machine can understand it.

on the other hand, i can generate an infinite number of novel sentences and you can understand them -- not to mention generate words that are not "in the dictionary" and you will understand them too. language is _constantly_ evolving and changing... anyone who says otherwise is the real product of bad english teaching.