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Scottish Students Used Spellchecker Glitch To Cheat In Literacy Test (bbc.com)

Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: Schools are to be given advice on how to disable a glitch that allows pupils sitting online spelling tests to right-click their mouse and find the answer. It follows the discovery by teachers that children familiar with traditional computer spellcheckers were simply applying it to the tests. The Scottish National Standardized Assessments were introduced to assess progress in four different age groups. A spokesman said the issue was not with the Scottish National Standardized Assessments (SNSA) but with browser or device settings on some machines.

Introduced in 2017, the spelling test asks children to identify misspelt words. However, on some school computers the words were highlighted with a red line. Pupils who right-clicked on the words were then able to access the correct spelling. The web-based SNSA tool enables teachers to administer online literacy and numeracy tests for pupils in P1, P4, P7 and S3, which are marked and scored automatically. Advice is being given to schools about how to disable the spellchecking function.

2 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Some spell checkers ... by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 0, Troll

    Some spell checkers... suck worse at spelling than students, though.

    Most of the awful spelling checker issues I've encountered is British Isles dictionary entries that still seem to be used despite configuring for American English.

    But this was Scotland, on the British Isles, ruled by the British Monarch, a central part of the British Commonwealth / Empire. (I'm not sure how close its standard spellings are to those of England, but I bet if they're not virtually identical they're closer than either to American English, with over two centuries of divergence.

    Yo. Dudes! We split from the British Empire before dictionaries and were invented and standardized spelling began to be promoted - with one of our revolutionaries (Daniel Webster) instrumental in both. Our "standard" (east-coast elite imposed or otherwise) spelling(s) is/are different from those on the other side of "the pond".

    Over here it's "color", not "colour", "honor", not "honour", follilize, not fossilise (and lots of other -ize vs. -ise endings), and so on.

    So why do the spelling checkers (for instance, in Firefox on Ubuntu) gripe about the American English spellings despite all the language settings being set to American, rather than British Empire, English?

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  2. Re: outsourced by fools... think of the children.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.